driven by my own experiences as new ROS tester and by other forum threads which show similiar issues I suggest following in order to improve the website experience for new people willing to take ROS for a test ride:
There should be a better introduction/landing page for testers which links to all the important information spread over the wiki, the forum and even youtube.
Assume someone is visiting https://reactos.org and needs infos about how to test software with it. Typically the needed information will be (in this order):
- What is the current version to be tested?
-> Currently only announced in the forum? Or found by checking the table at the very bottom of any test page or by checking the list of daily builds? Should be more prominent imho. - How to set up ROS so it runs stable?
-> https://reactos.org/wiki/Installing_ReactOS, https://www.reactos.org/wiki/User:Matthiasbasler - How to set up an ideal testing/logging environment (which is not the same as the question before)
-> https://reactos.org/wiki/Testing_Central, https://www.reactos.org/wiki/Testing_Introduction, https://reactos.org/wiki/VirtualBox, https://reactos.org/wiki/Debugging, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn4Nu_lm5e0, https://www.reactos.org/wiki/User:Oldman - Where to post the results of my tests
https://reactos.org/wiki/Tests_for_0.4.9, viewtopic.php?p=131850#p131850, viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10972 - How to create good bug reports
Explained here and this page is, for a change, nicely linked from the home page. - Do's and Don's, aka project specific rules.
Something like: Please don't edit testing pages after the release, ...
- There is a testing landing page (?) on the home page which is rather bare.
- There a testing FAQ which contains important info but leaves open many basic questions. (Besides, given the usually short answers the used expand widget is imho more distracting than helpful.)
- The wiki contains multiple good and very good pages about testing (several listed above), but they have to be found and some are somewhat outdated, leading to confusion.
- Some pages or chapters are very detailed/technical and hence hard to understand for a newbee who is just looking for a step-by-step tutorial (for example https://reactos.org/wiki/Debugging).
- There is a "Testing Central" landing page, but it is seemingly not linked to by the home page's testing-related pages.
- There's no stable "latest version under test" link on the testing pages which is kept up-to-date
- Several questions have been answered in the forum (some of them multiple times)
- The forum/wiki search are not satisfactory. Ofen you need to know the exact term you are looking for which cannot be expected from newbees. (Plus, you have to search forum and wiki separately.)
Therefore I suggest to collect all needed information on one central testing landing page in the wiki prominently linked to from the home page, and be it just as a collection of links.