Welcome @barton26 as the Gridcoin test coordinator!
He will be helping out testing new releases and will be responsible for coordinating testers, gathering issue reports and provide statistics and numbers during heavy forking. This will be extremely valuable to help tracking down the heavy bugs and will take some stress out of the developers, allowing us to focus on the code. He will become a part of the dev team with this role and will be covered by the regular developer payment.
As of right now his current task to track down and document the blocks which are causing our test nodes to either stop syncing or derail onto forks.
Thank you to @ravonn and all the other devs for their hard work on this fantastic project. I am honored to be selected for this role.
For anyone out there who wants to help with testing the newest releases on testnet, feel free to join the #testnet channel on the Gridcoin Slack and we'll get you up and running. If you need an invite to the Slack, reply to this comment or PM me on reddit for an invite link.
First of all, congrats @barton26! This is very good news.
I think it would be useful if you could provide regular updates on other platforms (like Steemit) so people can follow, with little effort, the progress. The more we engage with the community, but also investors, the better for Gridcoin. I'm more than happy to help here if needed.
I definitely agree that more communication regarding testnet status is needed on other platforms. I am currently making an effort to port a lot of the resources over to Rocket Chat and hopefully I can create a "Getting Starting" guide for testnet on Steemit soon.
Thumbs up!
You certainly are needed. But slack again?
I already wrote half a year ago that it is not a good idea to put everything on something nearly nobody knows and not longer communicate on the channels people are used to and can watch without installing and signing up something...
There aren't even version updates in the "main" forum thread anymore!!
Also when that move to slack came I installed slack, but after 2-3 weeks of exactly nothing I stopped opening that thing every day.
But I will give it a second try.
edit: I don't even see a testnet channel sigh
I am also in the process of moving testnet resources to Rocket Chat and in the future I will be compiling a "Getting Started" guide for testnet on Steemit.
I just invited you to the testnet channel.
Nice. Congrats!
On a side note I've been slowly getting more addicted to Gridcoin and I've been thinking about creating a test tool for the testnet. I'm not sure how viable or helpful it would be, but I thought maybe developing some simple automation to drive test cases using the existing CLI support. I'm not sure what really "helps" on the testnet other than running a node though. I'd prefer to come up with some intelligent command sequences rather than spam some random command just to try something different every 30 seconds (or maybe that is helpful too).
Anyways...still debating if I want to tackle this or not and what benefit it might have. Does anyone know if anything like this already exists for Gridcoin?
Any kind of testing helps on testnet, even just running a node provides needed stability. Feel free to contact me on Slack or Reddit regarding your automation tool and we can see how best to implement it.
a.K.a the Org Police
Congratulation and welcome @barton26 this is going to help the community greatly.
Great! I would like to help with a testnet node. Please invite me to the Slack Channel. Or on which BOINC project I am able to PM someone, that he/she invites me to slack.
https://grcinvite.herokuapp.com/
Code is "GRCsquad"
Very good, I hope the fork problem can be solved later