We've been privately testing a new version of the BYOND pager for the last few months. Many, many thanks to those involved. It's now ready for a brief (hopefully) public testing period, so if you want to give it a try, just download from the latest post in this thread (which we'll update with new releases). We are providing the ZIP version here so it won't conflict with your official BYOND install-- just unzip it on your desktop (or wherever) and run the included byond.exe from there.
This is a far superior product to the current pager. Most notably, it has numerous ways to find games (previously only accessible from the website). It also has a much improved messaging system. The downside (if you want to look at it that way) is that the pager runs some ads, which we desperately need for revenue. BYOND Members can disable these. An interstitial (video) commercial will run when you connect to a game, at most once every five minutes.
Please let us know of any issues you have in the Beta Bugs forum immediately below this one. If you have comments or suggestions for this new software, feel free to use this forum to relay them.
ID:1199074
 Mar 15 2013, 12:56 pm
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http://www.byond.com/download/beta/ 499.1174_byond_experimental.zip
Just a few minor fixes to reported issues. | |
http://www.byond.com/download/beta/ 499.1175_byond_experimental.zip
Mainly a fix for the memory issues people have been seeing. Please let us know if this resolves the problem. This also includes a few bug fixes (as noted in the Beta Bugs), support for DM tags in pages, and some backend improvements that will be used in some new features for the next build. | |
http://www.byond.com/download/beta/ 499.1176_byond_experimental.zip
The last build was buggy. Try this one! | |
http://www.byond.com/download/beta/ 499.1179_byond_experimental.zip
More fixes. The next release should have some cool new features and then we'll try to take this public. | |
http://www.byond.com/download/beta/ 499.1180_byond_experimental.zip
This is a pretty significant release and hopefully the last one (aside from inevitable issues) before we take it more public. Unfortunately, this forum isn't very visible and we only have a few hundred users testing at the moment. The main feature here is the concept of a "Feed", which keeps track of the message activity, website posts, and a new "updates" system. You can now post one-way "updates" to all of your followers or followers of your authorized (helper) hub entries (you can post to all or the individual items). These will appear on the "feed" tab for those users (they have to be on the beta). The intent is for people to post updates about new games, or testing sessions, etc. Like pages, the feed exists in history for two weeks. We have various new alert behavior for feed items and pages that will hopefully be intuitive. Try it out and let us know. I'm thinking one could just keep their pager up in the background and be alerted to items as they come in. Probably most significantly, everyone (in 499+) can use the pager and update system; hopefully this will not be spammy. I am pretty confident it'll be OK because 1) the new system doesn't provide a way to mass-page strangers since everything has to be done individually, 2) the pager block controls are very good and will block not only the spammer key but also all correlated users, 3) the updates system only goes to people following you or your games, and 4) we have some time-based controls to avoid spamming, and can improve on heuristics as needed. Bookmarks have been restored as requested, and there is an "Open" button on the Games tab for quick access to the "open location" direct-url input, where bookmarks can also be set and used. Lummox JR worked very hard to improve the reponsiveness and memory footprint of the system and it does seem to be a lot more efficient, but we'll need feedback. This update includes a few unrelated fixes and a minor feature. Hopefully that all works OK. | |
http://www.byond.com/download/beta/ 499.1181_byond_experimental.zip
A few fixes for today's release. | |
http://www.byond.com/download/beta/ 499.1183_byond_experimental.zip
More fixes (documented in Beta Bugs). Also included are a maptext fix (which may resolve ID:1186865), and some optimizations to greatly improve loading time for large projects. | |
http://www.byond.com/download/beta/ 499.1184_byond_experimental.zip
A few more fixes. We've disabled the static ads at the bottom for the time-being. They are a bit too distracting for the negligible income they appear (not) to generate. We might re-enable for testing down the line. | |
BYOND version 499.1185 has been released.
Please note: There is a new message sent by servers in this release to 499+ clients. It is specifically intended to improve transitioning between servers in link() situations. Older betas won't recognize this and could have trouble joining games on new servers. Be sure to update to the newest version as soon as possible. | |
This is officially the 21st release of the pager beta test but the first to the public.
Please test as much as you can!