Beta Blogs and Forums -- post launch notes 070420

Just a quick little update on where we stand a few days following our announcement of the beta.

1) beta means different things to different people.  this probably goes without saying, but suffice to say, the "beta" messaging has caused confusion

exhibit a
user response -- that's it?  what about feature x, y, z? [paraphrased for simplicity]

exhibit b
people are posting questions on the beta forums in manners consistent with those looking for answers in our current communities

as a result, you will soon see gradual (and in some cases sudden) changes in the experience to clearly state the intent of us announcing the existence of these services.  in a nutshell, we wanted to show our progress on these services so far, while also beginning to dialogue openly with everyone on the types of experiences they would like to see in the future.  while we know where we'd like to go tomorrow, to what extent does that match what you are thinking?

2) there are some random quirks throughout the system.  one of my favorites at the moment is that everything on the blog or the forum is sorted by the last active date.  so in effect, me commenting on a blog post from five days ago would bump that to to the top.  while this may make sense in a forum, it doesn't seem to be as appropriate for a blog.

the development team is working on resolving this and some other quirks, while adding some new features for the next refresh.

3) there is a lot of great discussion about features, bugs, and overall roadmap type things.  this is great!  this is exactly what we are trying to foster in this grand experiment with this feedback driven development experiment (formerly known as "beta")

i'll be posting these sorts of notes periodically so stay tuned!

(xposted with my beta blog)