23 December 2010, 18:00

Hello,

[Sorry for cross-posting, but we did not yet have time to fix the notification problem of the news forum]

Starting with the new year, actually on 10 January 2011 (NZDT time), there will be changes to the demo site of Mahara as well as master.dev. We are going to make these changes to

• make it easier for (potential) users to trial Mahara in the latest stable release (demo) and the development version (master)
• make it more difficult for spammers to misuse these sites

These changes will mean that we will have a few accounts set up that also include a bit of content. You do not longer have to register a user name, but can get started immediately. However, you can still set up an account for yourself if you wish to test Mahara with a personal account.

The demo site will be reset each day at a specific time. That means that we will have a fresh installation of a Mahara demo each day.

The master.dev site will have a similar approach only that the reset timeframe will be longer so that users and developers can do more testing on the upcoming features. More details will follow.

For demo site users: If you created views on demo.mahara.org that you wish to keep, you must export them before 9 January 2011 (for the USA: 8 January 2011). As the demo site is that: a demonstration of features and not a supported site for portfolio use, there will be no data transfer to the new demo site.

We hope that these changes will allow you and also new users of Mahara to test features out more easily and quickly without the need of establishing new logins all the time.

Cheers

Kristina