With the patrons shifting to a more singular rank, I think it’s time that we re-look the way that we release features that are available on the site.

I know that we’re supposed to release things to patrons before the general public, and I think it’s a good idea to adhere to this. But as the group of patrons grows significantly, the ability to get limited testing is almost impossible (I noticed this a lot while getting Ladon’s rating system working). Therefore, I suggest that we add another group of people to our release workflow that would be reliable enough to actually test out these features and give us suggestions (This also has the added bonus of letting us test out patron-only features with more reliability). By doing this our workflow for releasing things looks more like this:

Site Programmers / Admins (4 People)

to

Beta Testers (8-10 People)

to

Patrons (121 People)

to

General Public (All People)

All we’d have to do is add a “Beta Testers” group/forum and then post whenever we have a new thing for them to try out/discuss. We’d might even consider it a concept team for suggesting new features for the site and stuff. Anyways, what say you?