Shaun has not done a press release on 4.5.  He posted a very short blog and followed it up when things changed.  I subsequently posted another more detailed blog.  As a member of the DNN Board of Directors and a co-founder of DNN Corp, my blog post was the last "official" statement.  If you look at the last newsletter that was sent out, you will see that it is my blog post which outlines our release strategy for 4.5.

Brian, you make a lot of comments that serve no purpose other than to inflame the community.  You are absolutely right in that customers are customers, but one thing I have come to learn in my years in the software business, is that the customer is not always right. On rare occassions, when I have a customer who creates problems far in excess of the value they provide to the business, then I have no problem in asking that customer to seek a different vendor to do business with.  Rarely have I seen a customer who seems as perpetually dissatisfied as you appear to be, yet who continues to remain a customer.

We have found that no one "official place" serves the entire community.  If we post it on the homepage, then we miss a lot of people who come directly to the forums or to the blogs.  If we post it in blogs then it is tied to a certain blog.  If we post it in the newsletter, then it is transient and not easily discoverable (although I need to research that and find out where past newsletter links are stored on DNN since they should be readily available).  Our strategy has been to try and use several different locations to get the word out.  Which is why we have people responding to the question in the forums, blog posts being made, and newsletters being sent out.  This way we hopefully reach the broadest audience.  The downside is that occassionally the people posting in the various areas may not have the latest information, especially for something like release dates which are pretty flexible based on several different factors.  While we try to limit the types of bugs that will delay a release past a certain point, this is often not something where we have a lot of flexibility.   We triage the bugs as we find them and if they are deemed of a serious enough nature, then we will delay the release to get them fixed.  Like all issues related to project communications, it is an area where we have struggled and where we continue to improve.  I would say that our communications on this release has been much more involved than for any release in the past, and yet we still have some improvements that need to be made.

Security issues are being addressed in the 4.5 release.  Once this is released, you will see a couple of security notices as well outlining the issues that were discovered.

I would not say that we can ignore issues in Gemini anymore than we could just completely ignore forum posts, meaning we are not free to just not respond.  An individual item in Gemini or an individual thread is no big deal, but the sum total of issues in Gemini or in the forums creates an impression on new users.  So if you enter new items in Gemini, we do look at it.  We may not give it the same priority or weight you do but it is reviewed.  The same is true of forum posts.  Saying that a person could come into the forums and make as many negative comments as they wish and there is no "cost" involved is like saying that I could go into someones house and urinate in the corner of the living room day after day and it would not have any affect on the family that lived there.  If the forums become nothing but a constant bitch-fest, then they will quickly lose their value to the many people who come here seeking help.

A couple of negative comments are a normal part of doing business.  What is not normal is a customer who constantly complains.  What has evolved over the last couple of years with some, is an "us versus them" sort of discussion, instead of what should be a collaborative dialog.  So in the spirit of trying to move this discussion in a positive direction, I will say that I have not heard of anything yet that would keep us from releasing 4.5 this week.  That is still our plan and we will make a forum and blog post if that changes for any reason.