It seemed like a good idea at the time: start some alpha forums totally separate from the public forums, so they’d be private, and Google wouldn’t keep a record of our earliest bugs for all eternity.

But it’s clearly not working out. A number of people have reported not being able to access them. We’ve spent way too much time trying to fix this forum without success.

So we’ve decided to abandon those pesky alpha forums that are giving so much trouble, and try another way. We’ve added a new alpha-testing set of categories to our public forums, in essentially the same structure as the old alpha forums. We’re in the process of migrating threads from the old alpha forums to there.

Once that process is complete, we’ll be retiring the old alpha forums for good. So, no more posts in the old alpha forums, please. It would just make more for us to have to transfer.

The alpha-testing categories of the regular forums are now live. So, please post your bug reports, feature requests, etc. there. These are the regular forums you have been using since December, which you can get to by clicking on Forums on the top menu of our web site. Log in using your regular-forums username and password. You must be logged in to see and post in the alpha-testing categories.

There’s a new way to upload images. You can check out the thread giving instructions on how to upload images (in Alpha Testing, Forum Guidelines, How to Upload a Photo to the Forums). There’s also a thread, Practice Uploading Images and Screenshots. It turns out to be simpler than the way it was done in the old alpha forums. But please be patient. It can be slow to upload large images, and you don’t get much feedback until it’s done.

We’re sorry that the private alpha forums turned out to be so difficult to use. We’re hoping that this move will simplify the process for everyone. If you’re an alpha tester that has been unable to get into the old alpha forums recently, please try the new forums and see if we have fixed the problem.

Also, if you see that we missed migrating over a bug report or anything, please let us know.

Apprecio!