Getting more people on the beta grid!

Looking at recent update complaints (and knowing of all the past woes), it's obvious that not enough different configurations are getting tested before releases hit. This is a big problem because the majority of people looking at the beta grid are a minority of SL's user-base. Many of the people I see on beta are people I'd expect to have more modern/high-spec hardware, possibly custom-built. As well as the odd Mac user.

However, the majority of SL players likely don't give a flying prim what graphics card they have, they just download SL, open it up and expect it to work. These are the people we need more of on the beta grid or else releases are sure to hit that have significant bugs for users, but which were not found by any of the beta players because they aren't affected.

This thread I would like for proposals on how to get more people into the game. And I will start off with one:

Get SL to find its own testers!
This is fairly simple. Basically when you open up SL it will take a quick sample of the system it's running on; graphics card, OS, drivers etc. If you are using the beta viewer, then this data is sent in to LL to register your config as one that is being tested/needs testing (if it isn't already listed). Some method of tracking how many people are using the same config, and if they logged in or not would be good.
If however you should file a crash or non-minor bug-report from the beta viewer, then your config is marked as having had difficulties. These are cumulative.
This gives LL some at-a-glance data about the status of configs that are struggling with SL, and hopefully allows them to find common denominators, e.g a particular driver version, graphics card and so-on. It also more importantly gives LL an idea how many major problems can be expected from the release.

If you are running the normal viewer, then when you open SL your details are still sent but as a query this time. If your details are not listed already (or only one or two people have registered them as above) then a bold box will appear on the front-page telling you; "A new beta version of Second Life is now available and your system configuration has not yet been tested on it. To ensure future compatibility with your system we strongly recommend giving the beta viewer a look!" This is followed by a link/button to take you to the beta/preview page.
I'm thinking that the main viewer would possibly still get its details listed, but not as a test configuration as above, this would be to give an idea of how many people are on this configuration (and thus the importance of ensuring it is tested).

The result hopefully is that more people who may have trouble with beta releases will be encouraged to give the beta viewer a try, have a go at the new feautures and check that existing ones work. It will also give a much better idea to LL of how well a new release will perform, especially if it has graphical or other important updates.

Thank you! I started using the beta during downtime yesterday, and was wondering how they got the information, as most Betas I've heard of require you to submit reports, duplicate problems, and document document, document. Also I always looked on the send crash reports as about as useful as sending a report to Microsoft. You have given me a differnt view on it. I like to bitch when things go wrong, now I will do so with a better feeling of at least trying to help fix it.