One thing that indie sites like this never really manage to get off the ground is a good network for beta testing. I'm a one-man company, so I have exactly 1 computer to test things on immediately (plus access to a few friends PCs).
I'm sure we have all released games that fail on Spanish versions of Windows 98 SE with ATI video cards and nothing else, so I guess what we all need is a way to get other, tech-savvy people to beta test our games.
I know it can be done informally, but I think a more formal setup, with mailing lists, and a proper submissions process would work well. If i suspect a feature may bomb on WindowsXP on Kyro cards, it would be cool to come here, scroll down a list and find that member X has that setup, so I can post a formal request for him to test my game, maybe we ca even swap testing 'credits' somehow so we encourage everyone to do their bit, so you earn X credits by submitting a test report, and spend X whenever someone sends one to you.
Just a rambling idea....

I've just thought of the same idea myself.
i'm on for it.

Very good idea. People with progamming experience testing games. Very very good idea =)

If you already have at least one game released, you can often just ask your players. They're usually more than happy to help out. Even if you need a specific setup to test against, one of them is bound to have it.

I've had pretty good luck asking whoever reports the problem first to help with testing. Again, they're usually quite happy to do so.

cliffski,

i'd be more than happy to
test any of your new products
at my shop.....i've got several pc's
with different OS's running in my shop...

if you're doing any sort of logging
to a text file, i can certainly forward
the results back to you...

Maybe we have a beta test forum here? each new post represents a new game, and all test reports go in as replies to that post?

posting results here is cool with me
if it's cool with the board owners......

I think having beta reports in a forum on the web are a bad idea. Google is bound to pick up the page, and if the name of your game is on the page enough, then the first thing some of your customers see about your game could be a bug report.

A place to request help is a good idea, however.

Using this forum for managing a beta test wouldn't be appropriate. I don't think that would make sense to do on flipcode.com, gamedev.net, or any other such sites either.

If you want to use forums for beta testing, it makes sense to set up a forum on your own site, so you control it. You can setup a free forum like PHPBB in less than an hour. Many developers find forums helpful for beta testing, but doing this on someone else's boards would be like spamming -- no one but you and your testers would be interested in those posts.

that was exactly the reason i said
i'd be happy to forward the results to
him explicitly if he were interested....

didn't mean any harm:)

I agree that a full-fledged beta test may not fit in here, but I see nothing wrong with posting a link to a beta-stage game and asking for opinions.

Sure, that would be perfectly reasonable.