We're finally back at home base. The past week of hardware news and pending releases means a queue the height of the door upon returning, so we've got a busy week ahead of us. Motherboards are in the mix, the Antec P8, multiple other new cases (a quick glance suggests four), feature tests for GPUs and CPUs, and more. We also have some serious website work to get done, including our final and official move to SSL (HTTPS), following which will be fixes to the comments section. We are also looking into overhauling the forums -- it's about time. This becomes a matter of determining how the community is split: A significant portion of direct backers are now in our Patreon Discord, but forums serve an important means for archival and 'slow' support with more searchability, so to speak. That needs to be overhauled. We're considering merging comments and forums on a per-post basis, but aren't sure yet.
Regardless, the first website update in queue is the SSL move, followed by some fixes to the comments and caching systems. These have been inhibiting us for years at this point, and with GN's constant growth, it's about time to get serious about the website's ability to handle an actual user base. This will also include fixes to email activation and the registration system, which has been bugged lately. We intend to keep the forums and comments open for all users in perpetuity, with Discord remaining Patreon-only (for now, anyway).
GN's in a great spot, it's just a matter of juggling the nonstop review cycle with website upgrades. We have some help server-side, so that should start rolling this month.
On the content side of things, we've just posted an informal "review of the case industry," and we've also got a few content pieces left-over from PAX & Whistler (where we laid the groundwork for the beginnings of our GNSteve side channel). We have more travel end of month and are planning the EOY/1Q18 travel, but there's plenty of time in between to work on CPU, cooling, and GPU features. The team is excited -- we've had just enough of a break from the review cadence to dig deeper into items on an individual level, studying deeper workings of the products. In our recent Patreon poll, we found most folks were interested in feature benchmarks (focusing on a single aspect of performance) for GPUs and CPUs, with cooling -- particularly open loop exploratory benchmarks -- ranking in the top three. This sets our guideline for the next month, as we want to fill some of the backer demand while we've got a very short break from the more difficult full reviews.
Personally speaking, I'm excited for this week -- there's a lot to get done, and having had a break from office work (in exchange for show work, granted, with PAX), there's a bit of a renewed focus on what we can get done. We'll start with the box pile at the door.
- Steve.