I’d like to suggest an idea (again) which I think will help the site and community greatly.
With the latest updates, LingQ has become next to unusable for me and several other users. Others have ‘just’ had some major problems.
The devs has said that they can only do so much testing, which is common for any programming project - devs don’t have hundreds of computers nor all the time to test everything.
My suggestion is, at some point, the creation of a ‘testing.lingq.com’ in which new features can be tested before being pushed to the main site. Users can join, do whatever possible to test out new features and bug fixes and when it’s settled - move it to the main site. Personally, I would love to test out features and give feedback on such a testing system so that the main site stays stable.
I’d love to hear the opinions of the admins/devs and other users of the community. Are the devs willing to set up such a system at some point? Are the users willing to test new features?
I made the same suggestion 2 years ago and offered my help. I remember we had a major update were LingQ was unusuable for 1 or 2 weeks. Users are willing but the LingQ stuff doesn’t want to do that for some reasons.
We will talk about this and see if it’s something we want to do. Unfortunately, there still ends up being a lot of stuff that you can’t really test until it’s on the production server with a lot of traffic and users. The problem with a test server is that you are not really using the system since everything you do is not added to your database on the main server. However, we would undoubtedly find more issues before launch this way.
If you decide to go ahead with something like this, if would be possible to send a message to the test-users saying ‘try X and see if it breaks, works or sort of works’ when a bug is found which you’re having a difficult time narrowing down. Maybe a page could greet users to show what has been happening (in a not-so-technical way). Perhaps a list of things which are being done/looked at would help on such a system too.
We’re totally behind this site Mark. We want to see it become the best it can be!
