Now that abstrax has taken over development coordination almost completely,
I finally have more time free to start work on my new side-project,
which will be a new website for refractivesoftware/octane, for starters.
I'm not going to discuss much about it and ask for feedback at this stage, as i've got a decent planning drawn up,
and at this stage it will create too much confusion to have community input.
I have already advanced quite a bit and should be able to reach the first stage and deployment within a few weeks.
I have confirmed the following changes:
* Move several things off the forum, as the forum is used for way too much things, causing a lot of confusion and difficulty keeping track of the large amount of activity on the forum. As this is not an open-source project, and things are slowly starting to resemble one here, causing a lot of confusion, these will initially include:
- moving downloads into a customer area page where you can download (much like the demo download page), octane releases, and archived releases, manual/docs and the testsuite.
- A simple and efficient private support ticketing system for licensed customer support.
- A simple private, limited support system for demo and pre-sales related support. To keep the forum clear of public posts (and as such spam). Eg the public areas will be read-only to non-established forum users.
- A 'submit a feature request' which allows customers to submit most wanted features, which are selected, standardized and put into a list where customers can then place votes, so we have a good view on what needs priority development at all times
- A web based material database browser and editor (for your submitted materials). You can browse the macro's in the livedb, with pre-rendered images, and edit your submissions, rename, update with newer versions etc...
- An updated, searchable FAQ system
* A new gallery with fewer but better renders, eg only 10-15 of the very best images, kept up-to-date are shown per industry/use category.
* Simplify the forums, and only use them for what they are meant for, eg discussion. There are too many forums/subforums which makes it virtually impossible for RS employees to keep track of everything on a daily basis and locate/respond to important questions, and causes a lot of confusion for newcommers.
* A documentation section with tutorials with and without video tuts.
* Integrated development tracking system for exporters.
* New forum version, with propper spam elimination.
I might modify/remove/add some things on the list, but this is my first phase.
PLEASE don't start suggesting stuff at this stage, it will complicate things at this stage, we can do that later.
What i would like to find out is feedback to the following things:
* Are there any people in the community that want to become beta-testers for 1-2 weeks to beta test the private beta site in 2-3 weeks ?
* Are you guys happy with phpBB ? What would you prefer out of A) stick with phpBB, latest version, or B) migrate forum data to a new commercial v-bulletin system.
* Are there any users here at all with screen resolutions (on machines you often use to use our website) lower than 1280 pixels wide.
* Are there people here who would like to earn money or hardware by making proper, detailed training video tutorials for us.
That's it,
Feedback on the questions above is appreciated,
please don't turn this thread into a 'please add X; +1, +1; etc...'
Radiance
