Beta Testing

(or, Why Isn't This Working?)

Up until very recently, the Phoenyx was exclusively a mailing-list server - its posts were available in static archives, and there were some primitive web tools, but it was still pretty much an email-only service.

We experimented a little with existing web forum packages, but realized we had a core community that didn't like web forums, and the tools to participate via email in a web forum were... well, about as primitive as the Phoenyx' web tools for participating via web in its email forums.

The Wirebird software does both (not to mention NNTP and RSS/Atom, and other access methods), but it's all still in very early beta (if you're being generous. Late alpha, if you're being... well, realistic).

We've focused on keeping the email experience as seamless as possible for existing members, so the web side of things is still playing catch-up. If you're playing (versus lurking) in a game, I strongly recommend subscribing by mail as the most reliable method. Just send mail to the robot at "join+ groupname @phoenyx.net" where groupname is the lowercase name of the group you want to join.

If you want to read by web, I encourage the use of the Phoenyx' tracking for read and unread messages:

http://forum.phoenyx.net/group?unread=yes

or if you prefer to go right to all the messages (still sorted by group):

http://forum.phoenyx.net/topic?unread=yes

You'll need to be logged in for that to work across multiple computers (it will attempt to track read posts even for guests, but without a login it can't always reliably "recognize" you).

Lastly, I've just put up a whole new template sitewide, and if I've forgotten to include any links some features might be invisible, or just not available from where you expect them to be (their placement probably made sense to me at the time...) If there's something you can't do, or something you wish you could do, don't hestitate to email me, Karen, at silver@phoenyx.STRIPTHIS.net (watch out for the wiki's address obfuscation - that's silver at phoenyx dot net.)

"I could do better than this!"

Oh, good, I was hoping to get volunteers. Wirebird is open source, written in Perl and SQL (we use Postgres, but everything's set to allow drop-in phrasebooks for other flavors) and Java Script? . Or if you're more artistic or usability-oriented, I'd love to hand off template management to someone else.

And if you're not at all technical, the best thing you can do is give feedback. Even things as simple as "this screen needs that link," or "I really miss this feature from my favorite forum package."

-- Karen Cravens - 30 Nov 2007