GMail was in beta for over five years! The beta term seems to have lost part of its former meaning, at least for web apps and the like.

I don't really think that's a good example as there was constant work done behind Gmail and the labs features that extend it.
In GOG's context I take the beta term as defining an experiment in publishing and not a testing period for software; this means that it can very well go out of beta right now (the deal with Activision could imply that that experiment was/is successful) or stay beta indefinitely.

Are you implying that I, the mighty tor, is fallible? Outrageous!
Back in ye olde times, software developers would never dream of allowing public access to a potentially buggy beta product. These days on the other hand, beta software is commonplace; in games, productivity software, websites, even operating systems.

Doesn't CREATE double posts, instead multiple posts by the same user are merged together if no one else has posted in between (I've only seen follow-up posts by the same user very few times, and then it's been several days between them).
A good thing by my reckoning. There are several other venues for conversation unfit for public eyes - e-mail, instant messaging, other communities.
What I would like to see however, is an option for e-mail notification when a "favourite" topic is updated, and/or when someone quotes "me" (no, I don't mean that everyone should get an e-mail as soon as someone quotes Maighstir).
I agree about the quoting and mark-as-read though, and there are a couple other things I'd like to see being dealt with:
* The bold, underline, and link buttons don't work correctly in Opera (they don't detect the selected text right).
* When quoting or editing a post with some special characters (£ and °, for examples I remember), they can get garbled along the way (I forget if it's always that way or just in some cases).

And I for one believe that large-scale betas are the way to go (be they closed or open beta) as you can get a real-world view on your piece of software that represents the user and not the developer.
No matter how many use cases you do when developing you can't come as close to true feedback as with opening your software to the users.
Crowdsourcing (in testing especially) actually works and that's the reason why it's being implemented more and more.
Opera has problems with correctly rendering pages that pass validation; it would be nice for the team to do a fix for it nonetheless.
As for special characters (they will show garbled in this quote), it's mostly due to the way they're stored in the backend (I don't think they're stored as UTF or otherwise they should show correctly).

I want an email whenever someone quotes Maighstir, pretty please. :)
Seriously though, we have no idea what there conditions for the service to leave beta are, when that occurs we will know, and maybe, just maybe understand.

Oh bugger, I forgot that I misspelled my nickname when creating the account.
Edit: Wait, you're not Uruk... looks just like him. I thought something seemed fishy, not his type of post.

I would like to have PM function; there have been times I would have liked to ask someone something vut couldn't do it due to the lack of a PM function, and I saw others having to resort to the forum for private discussions.
Also, it doesn't help we don't know each other's e-mail addresses, which, though, is quite understandable.

I don't know, I've seen forums turn sour and lose good members because of shit they received on PM.

updated my first post

Good, for sometime I thought I was the only one having problem with the quote function...

Quotes were totally bugged since I got here, don't try quoting a quote in your reply or you are in trouble!

...or try to make multiple quote from the same message (for example a quote, your answer, a quote your answer, etc...) sometime it works but most of the time either it makes a single big quote containing everything or stops after the first quote...

Don't have any problem with that as long as you understand that you're actually quoting a specific reply inside another quote (think nested functions).
You can't really use the quote function to quote something from outside the forum or from another thread though.

Again, never had that problem; you just need to keep the same post id in each quote part.
For example, to quote you're reply in multiple parts I'd need to write something like:
(quote_14)
...or try to make multiple quote
(/quote)
Reply 1
(quote_14)
a quote your answer, etc
(/quote)
Reply 2
And so on; of course, replace the round parentheses with square ones.