Victor,

In your last few posts about these betas you have said "test, test, test" - but why? What is in it for us? With that new "data conversion" module (which I applaud by the way) members who just kick back and do nothing will be in the exact same position as those of us who are working our asses off trying to work with the beta. As I understand it, when the RC is ready they will just have to press a button and most of their D6 will be converted. The rest of us have see more wasted a ton of time, and maybe even have been a little foolish.

It is a HUGE amount of work just to set this up. There are profile fields to build (four different sets), pages to format, settings, membership levels, payment options, several sets of categories to define, email templates, forums and groups to set up, language keys to define and much, much more- all that just for a basic set-up. It is FAR too time consuming and demoralizing to do all this work just to have to destroy it again after each of these betas. I've said this before, but the quality of your testing is falling off rapidly - people aren't getting far enough before it is time to trash everything they have done and start over again. This is not to your advantage at all - you are essentially destroying your test sets every few weeks.

In most of your posts you tell us to discuss this on the forums, not here - but Boonex almost never participates in the forums, as you do here. In fact, the only thing that seems to get a response from Boonex these days is the most inflammatory blog posts - especially ones that attack Boonex. Requests that are made politely are usually ignored. As a result, Trac has become totally dysfunctional - critical issues identified in the forums never make it there. With a few exceptions, most of the members who have access to Trac are using it just to post new features they want - the rest of us have to beg, and the product is suffering as a result. One member on the forum even says the only way to get something into trac is to keep bumping the post repeatedly because he thinks Boonex will only add things to Trac that they see on the top of the forum repeatedly.

This obviously isn't working - for any of us. If you are going to use your member base as your testing staff like this, then you should give them some advantage for doing this work - right now there is none at all. I have already found two major bugs in the join form - which I consider to be the most critical part of the system. I was tempted to make one of those inflammatory posts that seem to work so well, but I think that has to stop. Since that function absolutely has to work I can't see how it makes any sense to go on building and testing a system I know I will just have to destroy. Please go read the posts in the beta forum - you will find a seriously bummed out user community.

We need to get back to a place of mutual respect and we really need your help on this upgrade issue. If it is impossible to develop an upgrade script from this version please tell us why - and if possible, help develop an upgrade "procedure" instead. If that is also impossible for some reason, then please tell us the exact date of the RC. We don't have the most basic kinds of information we need for business decisions - and sometimes we get misinformation. If the RC is released in a week- as many here are requesting, or even two, why should anyone bother testing at all?

Please consider helping us in some way with the upgrade from this beta to the next beta or RC. I think almost everyone is on the same page here. These delays have been extremely damaging and we desperately need to start making some forward progress.

Rob