Rather than wait until June to get the maintenance done on the downloads system, I figured.. why not do it now? Reorganization of our downloads system is a must if we are to offer a quality service to our members and to earn a better reputation for ourselves. In light of this, I've reorganized a few priorities and have put the downloads system maintenance as first priority as far as I'm concerned.
Over the next week or so, the nDownloads system will undergo periodic disruptions due to live programming going on behind-the-scenes. This means that if the nDownloads system goes down, so do our entire stock of programs including the CodexChex database (meaning you can't use programs in this time). I'll try and lessen the downtime as much as possible.
The updates will commence in three phases, and include:
- 1. Removal of Quality Assurance System (Finished)
- Over the Programmer's meeting a while back, we have concluded that the Quality Assurance system does very little for regulating quality in our programs and wastes a lot of time.
- Because of this, we're now scrapping it and replacing it with a live Bug Reporting System, where if the program receives too many bug reports, it will simply take the program offline until the program is reuploaded and approved. That means no more annoying QA reports to fill out.
- 2. Integration of the Bug Reporting System (In Progress..)
- The Bug system will replace the QA system in that if the program receives too many bug reports that are classified as serious, the program will be rejected in that sense and will not be live until it is in a condition that is presentable.
- We understand that this puts a bit more pressure on the program's author, but we feel it will only promote better programming practices here and will discourage the speedy construction of programs that sacrifice stability.
- 3. Scheduled Cleanup of Existing Programs
- One of these days, the programs are just going to suddenly disappear. Only the few that work and have very little bugs reported in the program's topic will come back (after we've done our own tests). The Treasure Chest area will also suddenly disappear, because we saw really no point of having that area in our downloads (as probably 100% of the programs in there do not work, since they failed QA AND the layout changed).