According to alexa.com, 4% of all moodle.org traffic goes to the demo site. I assume that others go there for the same reasons I do: to test in a repeatable environment and to try out new features.
I recently got burned by a serious discrepancy between the demo site and the latest stable release (details in MDLSITE-234). The problem was fixed manually, but it left me wondering about the process by which the site is maintained, and what guarantees we have when using it.
If the differences cannot be documented, the front page of demo.moodle.org should warn users that Moodle does not necessarily reflect the latest stable release, and that it has certain undocumented modifications.
I've made it pretty vanilla, but it's not always going to be a reference implementation, simply because so many people are using it. Anybody could change a setting on you at any time.
I appreciate you wanting to test things, but perhaps it would be easier to setup a site locally under CVS - that way you have full control.
I appreciate you wanting to test things, but perhaps it would be easier to setup a site locally under CVS - that way you have full control.