Beta pages are now getting a bit hard to follow.

I can't speak for anyone else here, but I don't really use the forums much for keeping track of the betas. I either check the unity blog, or mostly I just go to the unity betas and patches pages obsessively.

There's actually a whole nest of issues here, come to think of it, and they're all minor organizational ones:

• There's not a single place I can go to and see "what is the latest version in beta, and what is the latest version that is production-or-patch."
• Previously the place to go see the latest beta WAS https://unity3d.com/unity/beta, but now that shows things from 2017.2 (while still talking about the 5.6 beta, incidentally), and the 2017.1 RCs were pretty hidden all of a sudden.
• Hopefully a way of making it so that we can see the "beta wrapping up" and the "new beta getting started" all in one place easier would be nice. I have to go into the archives of the betas to see 2017.1f2, and that in turn kept making me wonder if there had been an official release somewhere else that I hadn't seen.
• Coming to this page to get the latest download is super awkward: https://store.unity.com/download because it requires you going through a bunch of other pages trying to sell me unity plans when I already have a unity plan.
• And then when I get there, I just see a tiny little font with the version number until I go down and click to the release notes: https://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-5.6.2
• And those are fine, and the way of moving back and forth between them is fine... except that the official releases are comparably rare.
• I'm accustomed to daily checking this page: https://unity3d.com/unity/qa/patch-releases And sometimes there's a mysterious gap in time with no activity there, and I realize that an official release dropped during that time.

For someone who is new to unity and just wants to download the thing, I imagine the current workflow works fine. For someone actively monitoring all the feature changes in every beta branch, the patch and release branches, and the general roadmap... that's a lot of clicking around.

Not to mention it's entirely pull data with me having to go look for those, rather than there being a generalized single "new version of some branch of unity now out" email I can subscribe to.

Apologies for the long post. I love the information you guys provide with all the releases now, but it's still just a bit scattered around your site.

Cheers!
Chris

 

There are pages like that. Or do you mean once central page that has all that information together? I think that's a good idea actually.

 

I've actively linked to all of the pages I'm aware of in the post above. But there's no consolidated view of what's going on. The roadmap page is kinda like that, but it doesn't actually link to releases you can download, or the patch notes, or the patch builds, or the historical release builds, etc.

 

You might want to subscribe to Unity's Beta and Patch RSS feeds:

Latest Unity Beta Releases
https://unity3d.com/unity/beta/latest.xml

Latest Unity Patch Releases
https://unity3d.com/unity/qa/patch-releases/latest.xml

 

Thanks for the feedback!

We're planning on consolidating and making a new way of interacting and dealing with the release notes which should incorporate a lot of your thoughts. I'll keep in mind your feedback for listing versions information too. Though, this is still in planning stages and a ways from being implemented.

 

In terms of Betas. The Archive shows you the last few released Betas. You can see there's been 2 RCs for 2017.1 and the new Beta for 2017.2