I posted this in the forums but since I know that some people are forums-only and some are journals-only I thought I would cross post it here so we can get better feedback from journals users.  

I'm starting to get close to a point where I think we can let a few select TF members play around on the new site. So I thought I would start a thread and people can post their interest in being part of this test group here. 

Also, it's a good time to sort of give an update on exactly where things are at. 

Currently, it's not feature complete. That means that all of the features we want to put in are not there yet. Below are the major items missing from the current TF and the new TF. 

Upgrade to Premium 

Top Members 

Photo Rating 

Voting 

Kisses 

Chat 

Advanced Search 

I can manually upgrade people to Premium so that's not a big deal. And Chat might not even make it into the release considering how few people actually use it and that we can use the Wibya chat for those who do want to chat. 

I'll probably add a few more features before we launch. For instance, I'm looking at a few arcade solutions where we can put a bunch of Flash based games in a specific thread in the forums and people can compete for high scores and such. 

Some of the yet to be completed pieces will take longer than others and I'm still tweaking and adding in some of my pet tweaks here and there. Overall, I think I'm about a month (or less) away from being feature complete. 

So why did I say about two months away from launch in the last update? Two reasons: 

1. I'm expecting people to give me feedback that might take some time to remedy. 

2. I have to figure out a way to get all of the old data out of the current TF and into the new TF. 

The message boards, PMs, users, and other basic data that is forum related (if you see DB_phpBB2 in the URL it's forum related) will transfer over easily. Journals, kisses, votes, and user preferences that were not built into the forum software have no built in conversion program like the message boards do. 

I need to write some custom code that translates between the old TF and the new TF that loses as little of that data as humanly possible. Unfortunately, just taking a brief glance at how radically different the two systems treat things like a journal post . . . it's gonna take some time to make sure I'm updating everything that needs to be updated. 

There's also the issue of transferring over all of the user pics. Considering that they're treated totally differently in terms of naming conventions, file types, etc . . . another headache. 

So, I'm optimistically thinking that might take about another month to get the data conversion and photos stuff sorted out. 

So the path to launch is: 

1. Get feature complete 

2. Fix up any problems 

3. Test data imports 

Do you want to help test the new TF? 

First off, I'm not picking everybody. I want to keep it fairly manageable and I want to make sure that I'm getting a diverse range of computer setups so that when we launch we don't have some of the issues we had with the redesign. 

So, if you're interested in taking part in this please post your computer config. Here's an example that would be useful: 

Computer: iMac 

OS: OSX 10.6.4 

Browser(s): Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera 

I'll start a thread on the new site where you can post your feedback, requests, problems, etc. 

You'll have to create an account on the new system (I haven't imported anything from this TF yet) and I'll likely delete everything from your new TF account when we import your existing TF details just before launch. I don't want any conflicts with user account when we do the final import so I'll delete everything. 

I'm not asking anybody to swear to secrecy or anything but please keep the URL and such to yourselves. You can post about your experiences on TF but please don't share the URL I will give to you. 

computer Asus S6

Windows XP professional version 2002 service pack 3

Browser Chrome

Info sent, Gee