Goood Hello Slippers! 
It’s been a while since a full beta release, but as many of you already know, a lot has happened during this time. This release fixes lots of small bugs and usability issues but the main focus is now in our future: a fresh start with a working title of Slipmat3.
The current site will keep getting small fixes and improvements but the main focus from here on is on two things: 1) making our current platform sustainable and 2) building a stable and easy to use from the ground up using all the good parts from the current site.
Before diving into these two, let’s start from the biggest new thing in this update: our DJ invitations are now fully community-driven.
Call For Volunteers – DJ Mentors Wanted!
Onboarding new DJs is something that has traditionally been on the shoulders of just one or two active community members (especially @asa – Thank You for all your hard work so far!) but this is also impossible to scale well in our case as things are in constant flux.
Here’s a good example from one or our latest members posted just Yesterday:
We already knew this and after a huge work of revamping the whole invite process I hope that more DJs would now step up and help with onboarding and mentoring new DJs. Mentoring is very easy. Read how the new process works and then post your details (remember to mention your timezone/location!) here: Active Slipmat DJs who are willing to mentor new DJs. How you actually communicate is totally up to you; use whatever works for you. You can use for example the community chat or Backstage private messages, or whatever channel you feel comfortable with.
I’ve created an insider forum here on Backstage so we can communicate privately about the process details and specific cases amongst those who want to help. It would also be nice to hilight our mentors in our documentation when we get things finalized with the new site. (And all volunteers will receive free services on Slipmat3 as well – this is community effort after all!)
So, please volunteer if you feel like helping out and all comments and discussion about the process is of course also welcome.
Slipmat3: The Future of Slipmat
I recently posted a development update describing the whole thing. Since then I’ve also started to write down technical requirements and documentation. The amount of content here is already quite vast, it’s tens of pages of plans on just how to get started. This kind of illustrates the current situation quite well: Slipmat is a quite complex platform and rebuilding it will take lots of time and effort.
The current platform works quite well as is and there’s no rush for any drastic changes but as we want to evolve from the experimental, ever-changing DIY-kind of feel to something easier to use and stable, parting with our old experimental legacy stuff is the first step we need to do. So, in the coming months most of the development effort will be towards the new site. The current site will get minor feature improvements and bug fixes, and it still works as a great place to experiment. I’ll be posting development updates along the way and I hope we’ll find a good amount of help from the community to design and test the new site.
A realistic timetable for the launch of Slipmat3 is at the earliest in 2021 but first DJs will probably get a chance to experiment with simple events in a couple of weeks time. Again, this will not affect in the current site in any way, but if you want, you can participate in the process (for example in our community chat development channel).
Full Release Notes
- Enhancement: New live page works now for private events as well. (#496)
- Enhancement: Tweaked new live page styles and typography.
- Enhancement: Updated Backstage main logo imate to be more mobile-friendly.
- Enhancement: Revamped whole invitation process to allow DJs to endorse (and invite) other DJs. (#502)
- Enhancement: Cleaned up all old DJ invitations and wrote a better automation system to keep the list in check. Old invitations are now automatically cleaned and when your invitation is deleted, your email will automatically be also removed from the mailing list as well. (#503)
- Enhancement: Invitation status page is now more helpful and much better designed. Also if you have applied for an invitation, you’ll see a link to the status page in your listener profile.
- Enhancement: DJs are now notified and reminded of pending invitation process. (#500, #501)
- Enhancement: Late events are now autoclosed sooner. Thanks @superpete for the report.
- Enhancement: Rewrote many DJ-related email templates.
- Enhancement: Reworded some of the DJ-documentation. Thanks @Dubio for suggestions.
- Under the hood: Upgraded all frontend JS packages.
- Bugfix: Fixed a typo on the new DJ dashboard page. Thanks to @jquico for the report.
- Bugfix: Karma is now calculated daily instead of random intervals. Also all newcomers Karma is calculated every hour which hopefully helps with the invite process.
- Bugfix: Fixed an issue with invitation process list not showing all DJs on the email list. (#495)
Finally
Big Thank You for the community for your support! We’ve had lots of feedback and bug reports and like always, such a great community spirit 
The sustainability of current Slipmat infrastructure needs addressing soon. As this is quite a big topic, I’ll post about it in a separate topic in near future. In practise this means that more DJs (and those listeners who want to support us) need to step up and participate in the running costs.
The site is currently in a weird limbo of a mixture of old and new UI (and for example two separate live pages!), this will be the focus on next updates here on the old site. Still, it’s nice to see that everything is slowly getting better and based on the feedback from the DJs, almost everyone likes the platform. We’re on a good path!
As the offline world is currently on a not-so-good path and everyday life looks more and more bleak, keep the music playing here on Slipmat and have fun \o/ 
