Waegis Alpha 2
Returning to the life, today I launched the Alpha 2 version of Waegis for private alpha testers. This alpha 2 launch was proposal from the pre-Alpha days and it means that things have been on the right track so far.
After the public announcement, some Alpha testers came to help me and assisted to feed the spam filter and test everything. Here all I have to thank them all here for their helps and support. I'll make their names public after the final launch.
Fortunately I got excellent results from this stage and am satisfied with everything to now.
If I do a quick review of what is done, I can evaluate the site and service based on two parameters including the number of bugs and issues as well as the fault ratio of the spam filter service.
Fortunately the number of bugs and issues was less than what I had anticipated so I didn't have a hard job to get things solved. Just a few minor issues that could be resolved quickly.
The fault ratio was amazing for myself. I hadn't fed the spam filter with much different data in pre-Alpha stages so didn't expect to get this result. The spam filter had less than %1-2 of fault ratio which is an excellent result for Alpha 1 with this initial data.
So the excellent results of Alpha 1 let me launch Alpha 2 on time and make it available for Alpha testers earlier today. So far it has worked much better than Alpha 1 and it reminds me of an on time Alpha 3 or public Beta launch soon.
But there is also another sign of quality for any software and it is the performance that was much much better than my own anticipations.
The other main aspect of the Waegis is its hosting. Here my dear friend, Hamid Shojaee, was a big help with his great comments and sharing his experiences with me. I was going to choose a direct data center hosting for the site and service but he logically convinced me to not do this. I would thank him here.
Finally I ended up with choosing from some well-known professional Windows hosting providers and finally fixed things with one them. It's not %100 yet but most likely I'll go live with a multi-server solution with a hoster that I'll announce in the near future. This surely makes myself and my clients sure about the quality, uptime, reliability and scalability of the hosting.
On the other hand, I asked my dear friend, Shaho Toofani, to help me with the visual design of the logo and theme for the site and he's been working on them in the past 2-3 weeks. I know him as a great designer and am sure that he will end up with something pretty cool. I really enjoy working with him in this great experience. By the way, he has sent me some initial logo designs for the site to choose between them. I thought it may be good to share them here and ask for your comments about them. So take a moment and look at these logos and choose which one is better to help us.
Last week some buddies informed me about a new Beta service offered by Six Apart as a part of TypePad that is targeting same area as Waegis. TypePad AntiSpam is built with the same technology as Akismet and keeps the backend compatibility with it. Two major features that they offer is free services with no limitations and being open source (just the core engine and not the rules). I don't worry about the competition and am sure about the software quality of Waegis and had talked about it before. But for marketing and business side of things, I need to revisit some initial plans and change them to some extent. By the way, I'm a single guy from the .NET world who's competing with big companies of PHP and Ruby on Rails communities. Although it's not very fair but I still have some power to compete with them!
The last thing is another request for site owners and bloggers to join me and help with Alpha 2 testing. For Alpha 2 I need more sites to be added to the service. So if you have a site or blog powered by Community Server 2008, Community Server 2007.1, Graffiti or BlogEngine.NET and have any interest to help with this, please drop me a line.
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6 Comments : 06.03.08
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@Simo:
Thank you (and your wife) for your comments :-)
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Can I be among your testers?
Forgot to say! I like the second logo, but the 'Spamming ends here' is not pretty while is italic.
@Mahdi:
Thanks for the feedback on logo.
But about the Alpha testing, if you're using DasBlog then I'd say no because I couldn't find any extensibility point that lets me integrate Waegis spam filter client with DasBlog without modifying the source code.
However, thank you for your offer!
#1
Simone
06.04.2008 @ 3:14 AM
Comment from my wife, which is a graphic designer:
Big logo: the one in the middle with the W only
Logo with name: first one on top