Getting Ready for Launch

Introduction

Ringbinder is almost ready to launch, and I couldn’t be more excited to share what I’ve been working on with you. It’s been a wild journey for me getting everything up to this point, but I wanted to make sure everyone reading this knows what to expect when it comes to the service in it’s initial phase. I really want to make this something that people enjoy having, as I still distinctly remember the pain of trying to set up Minecraft servers with my friends when I was younger, getting Hamachi working for everyone who wanted to participate, dealing with firewalls, IP configuration, and port forwarding if needed. All of that was a lot to figure out even for someone who was decently technically inclined, and not something everyone should have to worry about just to be able to play a game with their friends.

Expectations

As seen in our About page as of this writing, operations behind Ringbinder are as small as they could possibly be. This is currently a passion project of a single person developing network software in his bedroom during the nights and weekends.I really want to make this something that people enjoy having, as I still distinctly remember the pain of trying to set up Minecraft servers with my friends when I was younger, getting Hamachi working for everyone who wanted to participate, dealing with firewalls, IP configuration, and port forwarding if needed. All of that was a lot to figure out even for someone who was decently technically inclined, and not something everyone should have to worry about just to be able to play a game with their friends.

Currently, the service can be considered in an “Alpha test” phase, with all of the limitations entailed by that. There are very few features available, and only the most basic functionality. Many (possibly most) game servers won’t work. It won’t be the easiest to interact with all of the time. It won’t be as accessible as I want for people who speak other languages or have visual disabilities. There will be bugs. There will be outages. I will work on fixing it to make the service as good as I can as quickly as I can, but without getting it in the hands of other people, there’s no real way I can find issues I don’t expect, and I want the people who can use it, even in a rough state, to be able to while things get better. During the alpha test, I ask you to be patient and send comments or issues to the contact page so I can know what the problems are, what you want to see, or just if it helped make an activity a possibility.