What is Beta Tester Program?

It is a program where specific people, Beta Testers are getting previews of the website.

Anyone can subscribe to it, just by completing a form asking his e-mail and the channel he wishes to subscribe.

How does it work?

There are specific release groups, called channels. There are 3 channels as of now.

Canary (Mostly for developers, builds there have low stability)
Fast (Recommended channel. More stable than the canary one)
Slow (Best for simple people who want to see anything before it goes released to public)

These groups are tied to development cycles/periods. There are 4 cycles:

Experimental (For Canary but also for Fast channels*. Builds there are not tied to a website release)
DIMTHRAK SE Updates (To Fast and Slow channels, tied to a specific update of DIMTHRAK SE)
DIMTHRAK FE Updates (To Slow channel; tied to a DIMTHRAK FE Update)
Other (Tied in all three channels*)

When a new build gets released, Beta Testers get notified via e-mail or discord message. They are provided with the links of each build.

*Some channels may get the previews later than others.

Its history

Once in old days, only developers of the website had access to it. They could view it via the editor. Since it got transitioned to Wix, developers could have a link to a compiled/published version of the website.

This got changed in 30/03/2021. Beta Testers Program opened with one channel back then, Fast. There was also only a cycle, CTP (=Community Technology Preview) Build 134 of DIMTHRAK FE was the first build to get released to them.

However, when DIMTHRAK FE got in release preview, Beta Testers program closed, only to be re-added with improvements on 18 May 2021. Now it also had a second channel, Slow.

When DIMTHRAK SE started being developed, it had the Pre-Technical Preview cycle and then, the Technical Preview cycle. When DIMTHRAK SE reached General Availability, Beta Testers got a new channel, Canary.

DIMTHRAK SE introduced a new development model, "DIMTHRAK as a service", which is similar to the Microsoft Azure semester scheme. This meant the website would get updates every 3 months, and also that many new development cycles would be introduced. These changes bring the program to where it is today.