You can't fault people. With the last few betas it seemed as if the original beta was quickly replaced with a follow-up interims release before the new features really worked reliably. (A common scenario was "oh, yeah, we know that's broken, go download the interims release".)
And that was part of the original design -- we could very quickly get fixes out for people that needed them.
May be this would address the concerns of your customers without slowing down your development efforts:
The official "beta" link will contain the original "beta" .exe, until (in your opinion) there is another "good" interims release that should be used by every beta tester instead. Then that .exe will be found at the regular beta.
The problem here is that the interim releases would essentially become betas. That just makes the line between betas and interim releases much finer, which means more workload here for the interim releases.
I believe the real problem with the original design is that we made it very easy for people to get the interim releases -- so easy, that only perhaps 10% of the people using them are people that are supposed to!
Interim releases should only be run by people who have a specific need for the new features/fixes, and are willing to accept the potential consequences (odd things happening such as the C:\Declude.log file being used, having to go back to the last beta if problems come up with the interim releases, making sure to upgrade to the next beta when it comes out, etc.).
Yes, new features in betas will often have problems. But rather than waiting for the next interim release, it may be best to wait for the next beta. And the idea that our customers were attempting to keep up-to-date with interim releases without knowing what they may contain -- that's something that we hadn't prepared for. Doing that is a dangerous thing. For example, an interim release might automatically turn on the debug mode -- which could result in gigabytes of log files for some systems, causing the hard drive to run out of space.
-Scott
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