Hello Reg, Herbert, and Clyde,

For future major versions of Notation product, I'll probably continue the same practice of having a private forum for the early states of beta testing. This was done for 1.0 and 2.0, and I'm planning on doing this for 2.1.

I'm not sure whether the private early beta testing forum should be made public at some point in the product development cycle. I did this for 2.0 to smooth the transition from private-only beta feedback to public feedback. At the time I felt it would have been awkward to continue beta feedback discussions in both the private and public forum. And I still believe that this would be an awkward problem.

For 2.1, I'll decide up front whether the early private 2.1 beta forum will eventually be made public. If I decide to do it that way, I'll inform the early beta testers about this, so that they'll know that their comments will eventually become public.

Whether there should also be a public bug list is a somewhat independent decision. I believe the main purposes of it would be:

• To clearly state known bugs so that, a user might same himself the trouble of reporting the bug.
• To state the priority of the bug fix and predict when the bug fix will be available.
• To inform when a bug has been fixed, so that the user would know whether it is worth the trouble to update to a newer, free maintenance release version of the product.

Thanks for your ideas about this. As you can tell from the above, I have not made decisions on some of this. However, I do intend to have an early private beta testing forum for 2.1 and other major releases, such as 3.0. I will invite participants to the private beta testing forum, based on the main purpose of the private beta testing, which is to improve the functionality and usability of the product based on the beta testers' real experience using early versions of the product.

Cheers
-- Mark