Roku Developer Program

[NewbyDeveloper]

Hi -

Is there a place on this forum where you can get people to test out a private channel before you submit to be live?

Kevin

[TheEndless]

There's no official place for it, though RokuShawnS has been teasing for years that he might add a special channels forum. Usually, developers who want to publicly test their channels will just create a new thread either here or in the general forum with a link to install the channel. If you want to test it privately, you could post a thread asking for volunteers.

[RokuShawnS]

"TheEndless" wrote:
though RokuShawnS has been teasing for years that he might add a special channels forum.

Coming soon™

C. Shawn Smith

[thetick]

"RokuShawnS" wrote:

"TheEndless" wrote:
though RokuShawnS has been teasing for years that he might add a special channels forum.

Coming soon™

C. Shawn Smith

Sounds cool is there an expected , but tentative "Coming soon" date? Coming soon can mean next business day. In the case the of the Everquest 1 game release "Coming Soon" was about three years

[BradC]

I'm assuming that it was just a joke,

anyway, nobody can beat George

[RokuShawnS]

Probably by the end of the week or beginning of next week.

C. Shawn Smith

[EnTerr]

I am skeptical about needing a "special forum" for recruiting beta testers!
Such forum makes sense if General forum was congested by beta proposals, which does not seen to be the case (but get me straight on that if i am wrong).

The risk in branching out too much is ending up with "ghost malls/towns", sub-forums that exists but get no eye traffic. E.g. i think StackOverflow got some of that going on, when they started forking bunches of StackExchange sites. It started with obvious choices like ServerFault and SuperUser but with the years kept fractioning down and now on times one has to stop and contemplate: would this be "Stack Overflow" vs "Programmers" vs "Computer Science" vs "Computational Science" or "Theoretical Computer Science" vs "Code Review" vs "Programming puzzles". Or "Data science" vs "DB admin" vs "cross validated" vs "open data". And there be classification nazis that'd club you down if you post in the wrong (according to them) category.

Two questions i'd ask if i were to add such sub-forum:
1) will there be enough beta posts to justify existence and
2) will any visitors pay attention to that corner

Re (1), i remember seeing only 2 such betas during the last month - a game by Romans_I_XVI and (i believe) Musiclouds by jbrave. Where the later one was fairly limited call in the dev.forum (a-la "send me PM and i may send you a code") and i can't even find it anymore. If there is less than couple of calls per week, feels to me a separate forum will turn a ghost town, methinks.

I am proponent of "as needed" forking vs "build it and they will come" approach. AKA "lazy evaluation" or YAGNI 🙂

The alternative - as mentioned - is to announce in the General or Developer forum (where Dev. forum will be my choice if i want lesser initial exposure and more technically sophisticated audience).

[RokuShawnS]

"EnTerr" wrote:
I am skeptical about needing a "special forum" for recruiting beta testers!
Such forum makes sense if General forum was congested by beta proposals, which does not seen to be the case (but get me straight on that if i am wrong).

The risk in branching out too much is ending up with "ghost malls/towns", sub-forums that exists but get no eye traffic. E.g. i think StackOverflow got some of that going on, when they started forking bunches of StackExchange sites. It started with obvious choices like ServerFault and SuperUser but with the years kept fractioning down and now on times one has to stop and contemplate: would this be "Stack Overflow" vs "Programmers" vs "Computer Science" vs "Computational Science" or "Theoretical Computer Science" vs "Code Review" vs "Programming puzzles". Or "Data science" vs "DB admin" vs "cross validated" vs "open data". And there be classification nazis that'd club you down if you post in the wrong (according to them) category.

Two questions i'd ask if i were to add such sub-forum:
1) will there be enough beta posts to justify existence and
2) will any visitors pay attention to that corner

Re (1), i remember seeing only 2 such betas during the last month - a game by Romans_I_XVI and (i believe) Musiclouds by jbrave. Where the later one was fairly limited call in the dev.forum (a-la "send me PM and i may send you a code") and i can't even find it anymore. If there is less than couple of calls per week, feels to me a separate forum will turn a ghost town, methinks.

I am proponent of "as needed" forking vs "build it and they will come" approach. AKA "lazy evaluation" or YAGNI 🙂

The alternative - as mentioned - is to announce in the General or Developer forum (where Dev. forum will be my choice if i want lesser initial exposure and more technically sophisticated audience).

It's been requested a few times in the past, so I figured as part of specific "Public" and "Private" channels release forum, I'd make it available. If it ends up not being utilized, then it won't be too much trouble to delete it. But the format idea I have for it will give it a bit of exposure (moreso than it might have in the General forum, where it might get buried), so developers may want to utilize it.

C. Shawn Smith