WHy not make preview a freindlier place to get more people in and report more bugs

I spent a lot of time in preview in last three weeks and have some comments and questions:

1) Land is nearly always static, same old builds, no land to buy. Because of this we can not test terraforming, buying, selling, joining, dividing, audio and video. THis past beta there were just a handful of days with open land and it was a blast. I had 4096 sqM to play with and did a lot and found bugs to report. I can not afford tier, others are like me and would welcome the opportnuity to become mini land barons even if for short while. FOr the vast majority of time in this last preview there were several regions open, out of all the area there were just two sandboxs that someone could actually build anything in. All that space and there was nothing we could do but look at it or maybe test a vehicle. Out of the two sandboxes only one allowed scripting.

A)Why not wipe 25% of preview every single new version and put it up for sale? WHy not have all sandboxes open when preview is open?

2) I am not paid to be in preview but felt an obligation to give back to community for what I have recieved by finding and reporting bugs. But you do have Bug Hunters that I would imagine are paid. They were only in preview 2 days before release of the update. Before that the most people I saw in preview at any one time was FOUR the majority of time i was either alone or one other person.

B) Why wait two days before release before getting bug hunters in? How can I and others become bug hunters? Can we get paid for hunting bugs? Could there be a bounty for the first person to report a bug?

3) Nowhere in SL is there listed the status of the preview grid. It makes it very frustrating trying to help. Is it going to be down or unavailable for an hour, a day or days?

C) You already have the perfect spot to put the status of the preview grid. In the Preview Forum. Can someone when they take it offline or put it online please post a comment stating that in the forum?

4)These few things if addressed should make a big difference in people actually going onto preview. It is a great, safe place to script with no interruptions, People with a 512 lot like me or landless could build thier dream homes and so many other reasons to go there.

D) But why in the heck go if you can not do anything????? How is this any kind of a real test with so few people reporting bugs and with so many limits on what we can actually do? Let us say there were 100 people there everyday instead of a handful, all reporting bugs. THis would gcreate a bigger workload for whoever logged the bugs. But wouldn't getting 100 bug reports on same bug shave hours off the hunting?? You would have so much information on each individual bug.

5) I came across a page somewhere listing standard QA tests. But I don't know which ones to do etc.

E)Could someone put a sticky ontop of the Preievew forum containing a list of tests they would like everyone to perform ontop of our doing our own "thing"? Wouldn't this be a viable way to gather much more reliable information?

Ah, I'll forward this to Milo too for feedback on your comments (like /139/68/137348/1.html#post1292874 ). Thank you for taking the time to let us know, Jesse!

Hi there

Sorry for the delay been prepping for todays optional update 1.12.1.11

When we bring up a grid for testing its usually a standard set of regions, most of these are fairly empty or contain a few builds eg the welcome areas, then we also bring up some built up areas like miramare, lusk, tehama, a private island, We also have some hidden sims for both testing and teen grid sims.

This grid setup is fairly versatile in its content or lack of it, it means we can set aside land for sale if needed, its quite an effor for us to do that though, we have to make sure the grid is setup to allow public purchases as well as provide sufficient funds, and on top of that we actually have to put the parcels up for sale.

Also having the same regions allows us to benchmark speeds, memory usage, and alot of other statistics between builds and we correlate data between these, especially when we have the pile on tests.

I do agree about that one sandbox, im not sure why that one was picked, and will see about getting it exchanged for one of the others.

We do and try and let the public in as soon as possible, we have now for a few months had a two stage proccess for bring updates to the public beta grid, for example a development team will work on a number of issues or new designs there will be documentation what the bug is or new feature, these are in the format you see on the known issues page, the team will say we've fixed these or implemented these features, and ask for it to get placed onto one of our internal test grids, it will then get passed to quality assurance, where we may well send it back and forward as we find issues and work with the developers to fix everything we find, as soon as both parties are happy it will then get all combined together and placed on the public beta grid, where quality assurance will once again test all the items originally tested, as well as reading all bug reports made within preview and replying if we have time, i like to reply just as a small sign of thanks, and although the inworld population seems small at times, sometimes people pop on for 15 mins and test what they need to and bug report, we usually get around 500 reports for something like 1.12.1, and closer to 1000 for a major release like 1.12 all of which were read, entered into the system if they were reproducable and a final release decision is made depening on the bugs in the system, ie we wont release with a showstopper or critical bug and major bugs are looked at carefully, this is what happened a few weeks ago when we delayed for a week.

I believe we are currently working on bringing back our inworld tests, but the test list is a good start on the knowledge base, obviously with priority testing going to areas that have had changes made like we did with groups and estate landsales, the last release was especially tough as it touched pretty much every single part of the user interface and although there were a handfull of bugs we missed in the end which is unfortunate, considering the changes we made and what we caught in preview it went fairly smoothly although any bug we missed is a dissapointment, its not like any of us wants to release like that, but as you said unless we know about the bug we cant fix.

Also as you said we should try and inform about up/downtime of the preview grid(s) i'll try and get something sorted out either in the forum or knowledgebase.

Phew
Milo.