After a rigorous two month of beta testing, Collabable is just about ready to open its doors to the world as a full release. In preparation for the big day, we have been going through and tidying up many of the odds and ends that weren't mission-critical to the working order of the applications.

Backstage pass

The term "beta" can mean many things to many different people, so before we dive into all of the updates that we done in the past two months, we'd like to give you a little insight behind-the-scenes of the type of usage went down during our beta round. Collabable was first opened to the public by invite only on May 6 and we allowed in 82 accounts. On May 25, after monitoring the usage of the site with these active account, handling bug fixes and interface updates along the way, we removed the invitation process, and allowed the public to sign up and enter immediately. From that point up until today, 74 more accounts registered - making a grand total of 159 active accounts.

In terms of performance, Collabable is currently handling over 175 unique email and form discussion sources, which were responsible for managing over 3750 messages - all while maintain 100% uptime and 0 data loss. In short, it went pretty well.

Dirty Secrets

While developers love nothing more than watching their applications run without a hitch, the real crux of the beta is having an unbiased audience hammer on the application, and tell us what's broken or confusing, and that they did:

• Registration Fails: A couple of weeks into the beta release, we pushed in some code to change the way adding new members we're handled. At first, you could just go in and fill out a form to create a new user, and the new user would be created. We knew, however, that we wanted to let a user be a member of multiple Collabable accounts, so we updated the system with a user invite process. While the system worked great, it caused some errors for people registering for their initial Collabable. Luckily, users contacted us and we fixed the issue within an hour or two. So thanks for that.
• Loop of Death: In full disclosure, one day, I thought we were being hacked. Some one was systematically creating discussions once a minute, to the second, and they did this for almost two hours. I frantically called Floyd; he quickly calmed me down and explained an interesting bug, the "loop of death." As a user, you give Collabable your email address and you can request to receive notifications of new discussions via that address. So for example, you create an email source, you forward an email address to the email source, a customer emails that forwarding address, Collabable receives the email and emails you to let you know. 

  What our wrongfully-accused hacker did was use his user account's email address as the forwarder. Therefore, when Collabable sent out a notification email to the user, it forwarded it back to Collabable, to which Collabable said "let me notify the user about this discussion," and it sent another notification, which also got forwarded back to Collabable.

  

  This looped over and over until we stepped in and broke the chain. Long story, short - while you really shouldn't be using your personal email address as the forwarder address for an email source, we've added in detection to ensure that these loops are discovered and squashed.

Totally awesome updates

Ok, we've shared some shame, now here's some awesome for you:

• Upcoming Discussion Sources: When you go in to create a discussion source, you'll see the layout changed - and we revealed the list of discussion sources that are on the way: Comments, Surveys, Chat, Twitter, and API. When we say upcoming, we mean soon - our next big update after the launch will be primarily focused on bringing comment and survey discussion sources to life.
• Enhanced Filters: The filtering system - including filters, my filters, and the activity feed, got some 1st class treatment such as real-time filter counts, more update notifications, and a clearer workflow. These updates were largely due to feedback from beta testers, and will prove to be monumental as new discussion sources are availible, so thanks again.

On behalf of everyone at AbleBots, we want to send our sincerest thanks for all the hard work on making Collabable ready for primetime. Whether you reported bug, suggested features, or just broke something - you were a huge part in getting us here, and please let us know if there is anything else we can do to keeping growing Collabable into its fullest potential.