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The Beta environment hasn’t been running for years now. I don’t recall ever trying it out myself, and when I queried on the matter, we did get an answer as to why it was not running:
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Wouldn’t it be better if Bitcointalk provided a common test environment that was open for anybody to use, without people having to download the software and setting up their own environments?
beta.bitcointalk.org was run for a couple of years, but virtually nobody used it. It was too boring. I'd ideally like people to actually try using Epochtalk for various things that they find fun/interesting. Maybe try a more restrictive moderation style, maybe make it more niche-focused, maybe try adding some crazy features, etc. If people actually try to use it for real things, then the real deficiencies will be found.
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Some Epochtalk test sites were created as reflected on
this thread (I believe only Coinbistro is still running), but of course they allow to test the software with newly generated content, which is a broader goal from the perspective of a Bitcointalk user, but that lacks facilitating a more focused approach based on a migrated database and a parametrized environment to Bitcointalk’s future environment (were it to eventually crystalize).