I owe an apology especially to you.   I did a quick analysis.. and you are correct and you are also somewhat responsible for the stat improvement.

It has not always been this way.  It seems to be improved over the last few months.   Congrats.

In other Open Source projects I've been with, this has been a somewhat major issue.  People download a nightly build, then have a problem with it.  They post a question, maybe even with reproduction steps, but it can't be duplicated because it was fixed in the next build.  Nightly builds are really only suitable for the few who are savvy enough to deal with them or those who are involved in writing the code.

DotNetNuke now has a huge userbase of just plain Users, not programmers, designers or coders.  They certainly aren't ready for nightly builds.  Look at the questions related to the betas of DNN 5 for examples.  It's clear that users are trying to take a beta into a production environment and having troubles.  And that's a stable beta version, not unstable nightly builds.

Many users of DotNetNuke have little or no experience in ASP.NET programming, database programming and management, IIS management or networking in general.  Supporting nightly builds could easily become a nightmare.  As it is, people ask questions without revealing their DNN version, OS version, IIS settings, host environment or whatever.  Having to track and know which build they are on makes it nearly impossible to sufficiently answer questions.

The paid support, or DNN Professional program, might be a better place for nightly build support.

Jeff

Alex - I can honestly say, and I feel kinda bad for it, that I didn't think of the Gemini issues that could come up from making nightlies available. It's not release so it doesn't 'count' as code to submit bugs for in my head. hehe

I am a developer and I'd like to contribute to projects/core, but the current source availability makes it hard for me to crack open the code and try things.

I think the forum is a good example of how I feel about not doing some coding without being part of the team - It's been over a year since release, and a lot of bugs/enhancements have been taken care of - There is no way I'd try to do anything with the released code (from a year+ ago), it's a huge demotivator since there are going to be changes in the code that I won't have access to.

As it was said above - It is something that needs to be done slowly, and all aspects need to be considered.

I hope any problems and concerns can be worked out and I can have my nightly access. :)