• Overall Design Cleanup: New logo, solidified color palette, better and cleaner layouts, bug fixes, and usability improvements.
• The entire public site has been smartphone mobile optimized
• Redesigned and expanded Leaderboards page with new leaderboards.
• Redesigned Content Pages including new summary detail markup: Mazda RX8 Review
• New Video Player with full HD support (I’ve been itching to try this recipe, thanks Eggy!): Singaporean Mixed Vegatable Curry Recipe
• New Player Profile Pages: Check out Joan’s, one of our premier Topic(Category) Experts

There are many other changes and reveals, but I’ll leave that up to you to figure out until we open things up completely.

Some Truth

When you face your limitations on an ongoing, continual, and repeated basis, you start to realize that something has to change. After another 72 hour run of sleepless testing and development, I’ve come to the conclusion that the historical strategy I’ve taken of announcing completely unrealistic release timelines to support the facade of a big development team working on SR, and then scrambling to make them happen all while circus music plays in the background, just doesn’t cut it any longer. So before we go any further, I need to admit some truths:

• If you haven’t guessed it already, for the last 3-4 years SharedReviews’ daily operations have pretty much fallen to my shoulders alone.
• The majority of my skills fall in business, and entrepreneurship, not development or design (my respect for which has appreciated extensively these last few years).
• When you spend most of your time doing things that aren’t core to where your experience lies, you tend to underestimate effort and overestimate your capabilities.

Hopefully the above will at least partially explain the missed deadlines and crappy communication. I’m also hoping that it will foster some additional understanding and patience as we move forward.

Next Steps

Having said the above, I hope everyone will understand when I say that we probably won’t have any more changes until the 1st of June. Not that I expect it will take that long to get our Beta Testers into the site, but as part of turning a new leaf, I’d prefer to overestimate and surprise as opposed to underestimate and disappoint. This means that I expect:

• Beta Testers will receive access on June 1st. BTW, we are still looking for more participants that meet certain criteria. Please email info@ with your account nickname and a paragraph on how you can help if you’re interested
• All existing players should receive access within 1-2 weeks after that, depending on testing results
• New player invitations will start to be sent out near the end of June in batches, based on a first come first serve basis

April Fool’s Fail!

You may notice the “new logo” we displayed about a month ago doesn’t quite look like the new one on the site. It was meant to be a bit of a prank, and I was hoping to unveil the real “new logo” with this release on April 1st.

Update: Downtime Delayed – I found a few problems when updating our production servers that did not show up in our testing environment. I identified the issues, and worked all night to correct them, but after a 23 hour run I’m seeing double and still have a few more hours of heavy testing to complete. I’ll re-attempt the release later this evening when I’m a bit more coherent, and post an update here as soon as I do. Thanks

This is just a quick announcement that we are planning to update the site tomorrow night just before Midnight. We don’t expect too long of a downtime, more than likely less than 5 minutes.

I realize we’ve been quite quiet as of late, and things are taking much longer than anyone anticipated. I’ll follow up with a detailed “Where we’re at” post the morning of Wednesday the 18th. Thanks for the patience!

We’ve finished re-coding everything today, but we want to make sure we do some extensive testing before finally letting the public release go live. We expect to be done over the weekend, and Monday night is our target (some extensive data massaging will require a downtime of a couple of hours or so).

I’ll let loose with another update after the weekend.
UPDATE Monday March 19th: We’ve been testing all weekend, and although things have gone well, I’m just not confident enough for a full public launch until we refine a couple of nagging issues. At this stage we’re going to move the release to Wednesday evening. I’ll post more specific Wednesday morning. Thanks for the patience!

On Friday March 9th, we’re going to release the last set of changes to the public site before author access. This will include the final designs of the content page layouts, and the new release of player public pages (Content, Achievements, and Profile).

Another item that was rushed was the new logo, and we felt it would be befitting to give a bit of a sneak peak before we release it Friday.

I’ll post another update before Friday with specifics on the downtime for this release.
Update: It doesn’t look like the changes are going to go live today. We have finalized all the design and layout stuff, but the optimization part (checking different browsers, checking for slowness or bottlenecks, testing caching etc..) may take a couple of more days. I’m hoping Monday evening at the latest.

We really didn’t want to let any of the kittens out of the bag just yet, but I felt it was important to share at least a little something that will hopefully go a long way to prove just how much work was involved in this release.

Below you’ll find a small screenshot of a section of the new friends management interface just showing some friends in my friends list. I won’t explain each of the changes we applied, and there are some bogus numbers and statuses inserted just to highlight functionality, but I hope you’ll see that if even a minor interface such as this has been changed so significantly, we have some great surprises in store for when things finally go live. My next update, and another potential sneak peak, will be after the weekend on Monday the 27th.

At this stage it’s still a little tough to tell if we’re going to make the 21st for beta-tester access, but we will be releasing some of the groundwork necessary during a scheduled downtime that evening. Beta Tester access will more than likely fall on Friday the 24th if everything goes well over the next 7 days.

I will post another update on Tuesday the 21st to let everyone know how we’re doing.

Beta Tester Access: Tuesday, February 21st 2pm EST
General Author Access: March 1st – 15th

Bad luck, the last minute need to re-design our content page layouts, and our complete lack of being able to even remotely predict the time it takes to build stuff, have all contributed to the necessity of one more week of work at the minimum.

Right now, although there are tons of little things to update, we have three major issues delaying the release:

1) Refactoring things like the new leveling system, specialty achievements like the Category Expert designation, and the new content quality algorithms we’ve built to all play nicely now that they’re in the same room together.
2) Full support for all of the new content types, so access to some content types may need to be delayed until March.
3) Making sure the game engine is balanced properly, so there may be the need to delay some, if not all, elements until we see how beta testers interact with all of the new features being released.

It absolutely kills us to have to delay one additional time, which is why it took so long to post this (We’ve been working feverishly to try and avoid it). Hopefully we haven’t killed all hope for this release becoming a reality, but it’s important we pull the covers on something that works as opposed to rushing something that doesn’t.

Thank you all so much for the patience; Needless to say stress levels and pressure have been high over here, so your good will, prayers, and support is the fuel we need to cover this last mile.

I will post another update this Friday with progress to let you know if we’re still on track.

For those who cannot view the informational page, I have re-created it as best as possible here:

Every visitor to our site will be redirected to an informational page with video before being allowed access to any of our author’s content. We hope this move will help educate many thousands on the dangers of government imposed censorship, and add to the chorus of voices outraged at attempts by corporate interests to destroy the Internet as we know it just to ineffectively protect their already profitable and successful businesses.

You decide what’s more important; Your freedom or some corporation’s bottom line.

February 15th, 2012: Beta Tester Access to the full system. This will include all new interfaces, features, and the new game engine.

February 19th, 2012: General Author Launch with open access for all existing authors. Special prizes and rewards will be made available to all authors in celebration of SharedReviews’ 4 year full launch anniversary, including Amazon gift certificates and a brand new tablet computer! Details and conditions will be announced via email / blog.

March 1st, 2012: Full Launch with activation of all pending signups, new signups will be opened, and the new Author Cash revenue sharing program will be enabled.