Bitcoin Forum

I have gotten some free web hosting space and a domain name. I wanted to create a forum - like the services section - in where members can find jobs paid in any kind of cryptocurrency. I want to do this because of the state of the services section - it is too cluttered and unorganized. I don't think I will have signature campaigns on the site since that is what Bitcointalk is for - posting in topics relating to btcoin you have a genuine interest in. I know there's XBTFreelancer and other sites like that but I like the forum format better. I will mod it to include a reputation system like this forum have  I haven't given such a modification much thought but I want to be able to flag scammers, lazy employees, and people who are unqualified to do the job.

My questions are: would you use it and does it serve a good purpose?

EDIT: Link to demo https://basicssoft.com/phpbb

If it looked nice and had traffic I would certainly use it. If it operated like an Ebay but for services then I think it could be successful. However user liquidity will be important, you need people to offer services but also need daily visitors of people who are looking for cryptocurrency related services.

Definitely a yes from me, but if you're not going to entertain signature campaigns, will you also not be supporting bounties (as they're seen more as a job and very time-consuming if done for too many projects).

Your intention is great to keep scammers away as well as don't pay lazy guys who can't really manage to do anything but waste employers time, but trust me you'll really need good space for that forum to work smooth as if you're expecting people from Bitcointalk to hover at your place, you must be knowing what amount of audience you'll be entertaining and the hardest job after that will be to keep your forum free from those who won't really give anything after having their work done. It'd be great if you hire a reputed member of this forum at your place to work as an escrow and keep some funds from employers and release it to employees after the job done (although, even this is a win-win for employers as they can say that their given work hasn't been completed as expected and they get their BTC back).

I like your idea of hiring an escrow from here to make sure nobody gets scammed. I will support bounties as they can be good for say a programmer who needs to have a bug in their code fixed and are willing to pay to fix their issue (as I'm still a student developer who doesn't want to post their problem on Stackoverflow sometimes, or just have a deadline they just have to meet). Thanks for the feedback.

Absolutely yes on my side and i do somehow agree about on the "organized" thing on services section of this forum but people already get used to it even its isnt
arranged but overall people will able to seek out on.

Traffic or gaining users would be the biggest challenge for you yet you had mentioned that you wont support Signature campaigns/Bounties which most people on this
forum do really seeks out and with that alone you already lose big percentage.

Are you saying it would be more appealing if it had signed campaigns?

I wouldn't use it.   More choice at a larger job board, and anyone knowing my requested skills would accept bitcoin.

Not necessarily but if you tend to look on the current board of this forum you will really see the things much preferred as Vod said larger board do have more choices.So, you main problem is on how to make it big. ;D

Just some input on this.
I was looking at starting something very similar so if you want any help give me a shout, I'm not good with coding stuff from crap but know some basic PHP CSS HTML and stuff.
I also have access to a server so if you need some better hosting let me know, I've run my digital marketing company for six years now so no fear of your hosting ever vanishing and I have pretty good up time too.

The problem would be promoting that forum since there already are a few websites with the same concept and also most people come to bitcoin to sell or request different services. If you could convince people to go to your website and post their services there and also promote it so that workers could find clients this could work. But still, creating a forum just for bitcoin jobs is not a great idea and it will probably take a long time until it can get popular enough.

Are you talking about making a forum dedicated to job posting, or a service like recruitment agencies offer, which is companies come over to the agencies/platforms and get them to post their jobs there, and they sift through the job applications until they find one suitable for the client?

If you are recreating, and basically making the bitcointalk services thread with a better UI, you need to actually build a reputation and find companies/users that are looking to hire people. There are a lot of people posting job offers, but not a lot of clients that need them on bitcointalk.

i find two things bad about this idea which if they changed i would be more willing to use it.
1. the "forum" part, which i don't get. there is no reason for it to be like a forum in my opinion. it needs to be like a job "board" instead it can have two sections one where people post jobs and the other where people post their skills and what they are willing to do.
2. the "free part". the website needs to look serious from day one for people to go there. nobody is going to bother creating an account on a website that is using free hosting and domain which can go away tomorrow! not to mention that these things don't get high ranks in search engines!

Take a look at the Service section we have in itself - it doesn't get nearly enough traffic to sustain a forum like business model. If you plan to earn from it - that might not happen anytime soon.

My advice is you need to start it right away and don't wait too long. And if the website is ready to use, then you can announce here to invite people to join in your new forum. And if they think that people can get more benefits to stay in your forum, then I am sure that there will be many others will come to the forum.

I will wait and I am sure that other members here will wait for your new forum so they can visit and give a suggestion for the forum. So it's time for you to start something different if you have an idea to make a forum. But I suggest you don't use the free web hosting and free domain name because it does not look elegant.

Here's the demo: https://basicssoft.com/phpbb/

If you're interested in helping me administer the forum, PM me. I can't offer money right now because I'm broke, but if there are any paid staffing jobs in there future I will announce it

Sure I think it would help a lot specially for the people who only earns in crypto,or those who make crypto their main job or source of income.
I hope that you could add more job in your forum .

There will never be any paid staffing jobs, because that would affect your government welfare, correct?

Don't you know how Revenue Canada classifies Bitcoin? As far as I know, Bitcoin isn't taxable.

Your subjective opinion doesn't make this a good idea, in fact, as it stands now your concept sounds terribly inefficient and very cost intensive.

The services section is quite cluttered indeed but replacing that with your forum alternative is only going to partially solve this issue. I'm assuming you're going to make a bunch of sub-fora for each specific job branch. Now this will make things a little bit more organized but still inferior compared to concepts like XBTFreelancer. Since those sites allow you to set specific tags for each gig. That way it's very easy for the freelancer to filter out the gigs that aren't in accordance with their skillset. You could even go as far allowing the freelancer to set default tags on their profile and notify them when a new gig, that fits their criteria, is posted onto the platform.

On your forum, on the other hand, freelancers will have to continuously browse the forum (or multiple subfora) for new jobs. Which for obvious reasons is extremely time inefficient.

I hope you realize this will either require a lot of work or cost a whole lot of money (given this gains traction in the first place). You could avoid unnecessary costs by leaving the majority of the work to the users. For example: After the gig is posted onto the platform freelancers have a certain timeframe to apply for the job. When the timeframe is over the creator of the gig can go through the applications and select a freelancer, based on rating or work history or whatever. This action creates a private environment where the freelancer can view the job details, the creator and the freelancer can interact with one another. The funds are held by the platform and can be released upon request by the creator of the gig (If the creator is not satisfied with the work he/she can open a dispute and the staff will review the case). At the end of the process, the creator of the gig can rate the performance of the freelancer and leave a review.

It does serve a good purpose (you're trying to employ people) but if you're determined to stick with the whole forum idea it would be a definite no for me.

I like the idea but why you need forum for this can just make an app where cryptocurrency can pay employees directly or app that offers job for cryptocurrency only advertising.

Problem is you are posting it in this forum.  ;D

Next is, "the view is like you are stealing one section" to be placed in your forum.
You may want to ask theymos first if he is having a hard time about the clogged services section or not.
If yes then you ask permission to posts something like this and hear about others comments on how they feel about it.

We have moderators here and they are doing a pretty good job.
Are you thinking they do not and that is the reason you want to create your own?

I don't think unclogging the services section is a big priority for theymos.

Freelance website that will look like a forum? No I don't think that it will work, for one users can also spam and discredit your work just cause of competition, unlike freelance websites where you can only be reviewed by the ones you work for or work with this won't work as literally anybody can post in your thread. Another main point is there is no proper way to be viewed what people are offering for in a forum style website all are in lines of threads which users needs to scroll down just to find the right one, the other thing is bumping it will really mess up a lot a people who bumps a lot will be always on top.

Yeah the OP did not think this through....  :(

someone might steal your idea haha

I think this is what it truly is what it comes down to. If you have listings, then it will go somewhere. You'll have to do a lot of marketing to ensure people are going to use it.

Why not have a portion of it in the established forum like here in Bitcointalk?

I don’t know if you could somehow implement it here or maybe the forum stay the same and just would add an additional feature or something. Maybe request for a feature that could support your claim or something like that to help you in the long run.

Just stay in Bitcointalk and support it.

That is good idea for creating job forum. But, i think paid in any kind of cryptocurrency is already for any forum like this forum.
I think if paid in cash,giftcard and online payment good.

I think it does serve a good purpose, it's similar to what we're doing at Opsonion (https://opsonion.com/).
Other platforms lack good UI / UX but as some others have suggested, building traction is going to be the hardest thing.

The problem here is he created something new to offer without even thinking about the Pros and Cons on having a service section only forum website. Even the first sentence of the OP says a lot about his attempted project. He plans to run the forum on a free hosting service with a free domain which we all know lacks the reliability to a forum site running smoothly.

Ac=tually, what I meant by free was free to me. Somebody offered to give me a reseller shared hosting account at no cost to me. I said I got a domain in my OP (but I didn't say it was a free domain).

the "idea" isn't exactly new! it has been done before in form of "freelancing websites" and as i said in my previous comment doing it like a forum is not a good idea either.
besides, sometimes you have to share the ideas so that you can figure out if they are actually good or you are wasting your time. you may not see the flaws because of being too involved in it while others can see them from outside with a fresh eye.

This is why so many ideas on here fail.... people do not crowdthink.  :/

Looks like a good idea to me. Test post.

what is meant by losing a large percentage is the same as he is showing himself that the words he who does not support the campaign / bounty is he himself who actually calls lazy employees ::)?

I think that such a website will require intensive moderation to keep it organized.
But I would definitely use it as a web designer.
And I would also suggest a forum like this one as it is better organized: https://discuss.flarum.org/ (https://discuss.flarum.org/)
I would be happy to help you with your project if you are making it a reality.

Very unlikely, because the idea just isn't very good...

I would never use a forum like that, there are far better ways to come into contact with possible clients.
Sure, here the services boards do work, but that's largely because most of the services are tied to other aspects of this forum.

A forum dedicated purely to freelancers? I really don't think there's enough demand for that...

Well said.

They do force out things inside on their minds without considering majorities insight on such project thats why most of them end up on being a trash and completely waste up their effort.

OP it won't be bad idea but to my mind it's very hard to get good positions in google, especially when other very famous forums exist. You could create something similar of blackhatworld, I think this is what you are looking for.
Also it would be better if you allow signatures, someone will promote his/her service while posting too or hire others to promote his/her service.
Was thinking about warriorforum too but maybe first one is better choise.

This appears to be down right now.

It is down for me too. Looks like a hosting issue.

@OP Feel free to try BestHostFree.com Free Hosting - https://besthostfree.com/free-web-hosting.html

If u grow and need more resource, u may seamlessly upgrade with bitcoin.

You might check feedback of other forum users on our thread - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=617213.0. Wishing to see your feedback as well.

Lost count of how many people have tried to do the same but failed (or if they've succeeded, I ain't heard of them).

I think people vastly underestimate how quickly posters game the system when it comes to rating/reputation. I don't know yet any automated system that works (beyond initial phase) and can quickly adapt to gaming except for this forum itself. For me, the trust system still works for trading and the merit system for quality, and together they form the necessary picture even for when it comes to hiring for jobs. I'm a freelancer and I've found more work on this forum than on any focused platform simply because of their poor rating/reputation systems.

P.S. Don't get a free host. If you can spend $5 a month for at least shared hosting, you're just adding an additional layer of worry.

Oh lol, I was under the assumption that the free hosting was just for testing purposes, but now that you mention it, there's nothing that implies this in the OP.
Yeah, I don't think I know any free hosting service without some sort of catch. Usually they place their own ads on your website or severely throttle traffic or whatever.