<…> it seems we don't have access to beta.bitcointalk.org and won't even have in a near future (was there anything said about that by theymos?). <…>
There’s this to go by when I inquired about it:
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Wouldn’t it be better if Bitcointalk provided a common test environment that was open for anybody to use, without people having to download the software and setting up their own environments?
beta.bitcointalk.org was run for a couple of years, but virtually nobody used it. It was too boring. I'd ideally like people to actually try using Epochtalk for various things that they find fun/interesting. Maybe try a more restrictive moderation style, maybe make it more niche-focused, maybe try adding some crazy features, etc. If people actually try to use it for real things, then the real deficiencies will be found. <…>
I still believe that it would be better to have an official Beta on Epochtalk back, with as much Bitcointalk content as possible (a recent migrated content snapshot would suffice, no need to make side-by-side running content updates), run by the development team. They’d be the first to see/hear the issues people would be encountering during the Beta test with Bitcointalk content, which is really our main focus, let’s face it.
We know that the scope of the project surpasses Bitcointalk in principle, but most of us really are likely to be rather more Bitcointalk centered, than striving to test Epochtalk’s forum capabilities in a general sense.