My Opera News

Edited to add, Nov 6: note: As of Tuesday Oct 31, the beta site is using the same database as my.opera.com, contrary to what is being said below. There are currently no ongoing beta tests.

We are now establishing a new beta version site of the Opera Community, for limited public testing future of updates and such. We are going to commit to use this extensively upon future updates of the Opera Community codebase, which also includes widgets.opera.com and [censored-for-now].opera.com. By doing this, and with the kind help of some of you folks, we hope to reduce the amount of bugs we release into the wild.

In other words, this will be our testing grounds for new software updates of the Opera Community.

This time around, however, is not a software update beta, and as such there will be no fun new features to try out. There will, however, be a behemoth of a database server (well, compared to our current ones at least) in the backend, hopefully serving your needs that much quicker than before.

The new database server and the Opera Community Beta cluster is however not situated at the same location as the current my.opera.com cluster. This means:

• Changes made or content contributed on the beta site will not propagate to my.opera.com, and vice versa.
• Files uploaded to the beta site will not be made availalbe on the current files.myopera.com server which serves all user files

There are also some other minor things; no email notifications, no MMS blogging, and possibly other stuff I haven't thought of yet.

The second bullet point above, means that if you upload images to an image gallery, you'll see a lot of blank frames, even though the images were uploaded properly. We hope that even though it might be difficult to enjoy the full experience that you try to upload some images, and even try to edit some of your old photo albums. Simply do stuff, and don't be afraid of breaking anything---changes will as mentioned not propagate to the "real" Opera Community. Search for stuff, post blog posts and photo albums, etc.

We hope that you take the time to look around a bit around perhaps put some minor strain on our new database server.

OK. Hopefully you took the time to read the above. If you want to refer other people to the beta site, please refer them to this post, so that they know the limitations of the current site. We don't want to get truckloads of invalid bug reports to wade through. Currently, the Opera Community Beta can be found at >>> http://beta-my.opera.com <<<. The URL is subject to change once we have moved our servers. After the server move, the beta site will be directly tied in with the live database server and user file storage, meaning that we'll get much much more realistic test environments.

We would very much like to hear your feedback on this in this forum topic: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=164350 . We are especially interested in hearing about stuff which takes a very long time to execute (searches, posting stuff, etc) and stuff which simply doesn't work even though it works on the live Opera Community.