Bux is in Texas right now at the Consensus conference. She’s just getting ready to deliver her sessions, and we’ll have more to report on that very soon. Go @bux! 
Currently the team are beavering away to get another testnet out of the door, building on the successes of ThisIsNotBetaRewardsNet (tentative code name: ThisIsNotThisIsNotBetaRewardsNet) and knocking off a few rough edges.
We’re particularly keen to get discord bot fully integrated this time round to automate the calculation of nanos for those running nodes, and to bring some improvements to the node launchpad UX. Huge thanks for all the feedback there.
As a reminder, participants in the beta program are added to a wave, their position on the leaderboard is dependent on how many nanos they earn. We have a few surprise boosts for participants who are able to refer new users to the beta program (all to be revealed in due course). The position on the leaderboard determines the share of rewards paid in real tokens when the Network launches. The discord bot automates all of this and related processes, and @mazzi is in charge of training it.
We’ve also simplified the audit process to make traversing the DAG much quicker, in a way that is limited, but perfectly fine for beta testing.
There was some confusion over node manager versus node launchpad. Simply put, launchpad is just a front end to node manager, one that enables easy input of Discord IDs and desired disk space, but which always operates in user mode rather than root (on Linux/Mac). In user mode, logs are stored under ~/.local rather than /var, which accounts for the differences observed.
Special mention this week to @drirmbda for his “safe-node-manager manager” script and to @happybeing for announcing his website project.
General progress
@shu has been looking at how to make UPnP work for our testnet purposes, even though multicast isn’t supported on cloud providers. He has achieved some early successes there.
@roland added some unit tests to the NAT detection integration and has also been working on changes to the Launchpad.
Meanwhile, @chriso is also improving the node-launchpad UX, particularly for Windows users who need to download and run WinSW from a specific location. He’s working on packaging that so it will install to the right place automatically.
@anselme reviewed the DAG collection code and fixed an issue where collection would stop when encountering double spends. He put in a PR to improve spend verification and collection reliability.
@qi_ma is also improving the performance of sn_auditor package to speed up the tracking of payment forwarding. He also raised PRs to allow discord IDs that are added after the fact to be linked to the hash with which they have been tracked, and to make payment forwarding optional, dependent on the node owner setting their ID. Node earnings will now stay in the local wallet if there is no Discord username / owner set. Qi also investigated why client uploads slow down over time.
@joshuef is also active in this territory, putting in various tweaks to the node launchpad and improving the speed of the DAG for beta purposes by limiting the time it spends gathering unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs).
And finally, as mentioned in the intro, @mazzi is training the discord bot, which we are using to tot up and rank the beta rewards automatically. All is looking good there
Please keep em coming 
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