Reading over this thread, there are a startling amount of misconceptions here. I think I'll spend an hour or two writing up a general informative on how Default trust was supposed to work, how it works, whats wrong with it, and why.

Obviously, people are welcome to ignore what I say as biassed or corrupt or whatever.

Come now, you aren't one of the trolls who calls censorship abuse when a rule is broken and a post is deleted or a line is censored.

You shouldn't have to give up your pseudonymity/anonymity to be on default trust. You don't have to trust anyone who hides their identity. You can trust everyone or no one if you wish, that's up to you. Why does it matter what accounts someone has? If one of their accounts does something untrustworthy, then that should carry over to their other accounts as well. Persecute Quickseller when someone finds that one of their accounts has done something they shouldn't have.

You are welcome to think whatever you want, but I still don't see how this relates to Staff at all. The only correlation I see is that Staff tend to respond to threads in Meta as that is sort of in the job description. Tomatocage has added Quickseller to their default trust list, Tomatocage is not staff. If you have a problem with Quickseller being on default trust again, talk to Tomatocage about it. I'm baffled by the fact that people are fighting "preferential treatment", but don't respect individuals rights to make their own opinion. Would it not be abuse if someone forced Tomatocage to remove Quickseller? Provide Tomatocage with a list of reasons why Quickseller shouldn't be on default trust, if Tomatocage doesn't agree, then its on him.

I really have a hard time rationalizing what your complaint is. I guess I should first try to understand a few points.

Who is in charge of giving preferential treatment to people?
Why must Tomatocage listen to you?
And who is or should be responsible for counteracting trust of people you don't approve of?

I agree that Bitcoin is too complicated at the moment. Thats one of the reasons I somewhat resent those who are pushing for mass adoption. Sure it helps the value of the currency, but the stakes are higher than just your Bitcoin's value. Cryptocurrencies as a whole are a new concept. The distributed consensus model could be the solution to so many issues with the internet in general. All it would take is pushing one large company to use Bitcoin prematurely before foolproof and easy safety measures are in place, and Cyptocurrencies as a whole are sunk.

We get one chance at this. If Bitcoin is pushed down the public's throat before people are ready to try it on their own terms, one catastrophic security flaw, and there wont be another chance at adoption for anything Cryptocurrency. I think we are moving in the right direction, but it has to be just as easy to secure your Bitcoins as you can your cash or assets before everyone is ready to give it a try.

Glad to hear it, thanks for letting me know 

Again, $1.5m may sound like a lot, but split amongst a team of people over years, it really isn't. Building epochtalk is really a colossal task. Its not like designing a website, its building a multifaceted and interactive software to compete and surpass other forum softwares in terms of usability. The reason Bitcointalk hasn't updated its SMF version in forever, is because so many custom add ons are already in place just to make this forum usable, updating and then fixing compatibility would take thousands of hours. SMF is so broken, without Theymos' custom patches, Bitcointalk wouldn't be able to handle nearly as many people as it has right now. Stop thinking about the cost to build something like SMF, Epochtalk will be on a different level.

The backend of Bitcointalk is pathetic. The moderator tools are patched together, the admin tools are patched together, user functionality is at a minimum, there isn't integrated PGP, there isn't integrated Bitcoin message signing, there aren't integrated market tools, you can't delete anything because SMF is single threaded, the entire system is archaic and slow, indexing is slow, banning users is hugely time consuming and complicated, usergroup permissions are messed up. And thats just what I could think of off the top of my head. It would probably cost $100k to have a team of people build everything we need on top of SMF, but again we would face the issue of what to do when its time to upgrade something. The goal is to have a new software that can easily be upgraded and expanded upon whenever we need.

As a member here, this forum seems fine enough. People are happy to complain about avatars or the trust system or whatever minor changes they would like, but the forums is in dire need of a complete overhaul. Is $1.5m too much, perhaps, but if we get $1.5m worth of forum then its money well spent.

While 1.5M seems like quite a bit, when you have a team of 10 people employed for 2 years (or however long it takes) + years of future support, it doesn't seem like very much. Theymos is a pretty bright guy, I have a hard time thinking Slickage tricked him. I fail to see how people who haven't seen the work done behind the scenes can even speculate as to the costs. I don't know if the forum software is going to be worth $1.5M, but how could anyone possibly speculate without seeing a finished product? Bust Theymos' balls and start burning things when and if we see an inferior end product. I will be happy to join you 

Something that people fail to realize, is that Theymos wouldn't have to funnel forum funds. With the exception of donator funds which were explicitly said to be going towards new forum software, Theymos could probably legally just take Bitcointalk's funds if he wanted them. Why sneak around and slowly steal forum funds when you could just do it all at once without any repercussions?

Regarding the UI discussion, UI work hasn't started yet. If you see any nasty looking screenshots of epochtalk, thats because its just placeholders at this point. There are UI guys who will be working with everyone to design aesthetically pleasing theme(s). The backend work is very complicated, vast improvements are being added, and some pivotal features that aren't available in any current forum software.

What assurance do you have to back up that Badbear is Quickseller 100%? I think all if not most of your arguments are either wrong or irrelevant.

Rather than starting a thread, you could have checked the default trust list to see that Quickseller is trusted by Tomatocage, and then Pmed Tomatocage asking for a reason why they added Quickseller.

As long as its legal where you are at, and you aren't selling it to places where it is illegal, you are fine.

Oh, I know what you mean now. Heh, too much prior discussion of private built hosting centers on islands had me thinking in extremes.

My bad.

We are discussing the feasibility of creating our own hosting location, having our own facilities, not giving another random 3rd party access to the server. I thought you were aware that the hosting company staff were the weak link in this hack. The way to get around that, is to change to a facility operated by an employee of the Bitcointalk. That would involve building our own infrastructure, hiring staff to monitor its physical location, etc. That would also involve owning property to build on.

If we just rent server space from an already established company, we face the same issues. Not having complete trust of the people who have access to the server. So if we are talking about just changing hosts to something that isn't a large operation in a giant datacenter to a shared location with a couple of other people, we still have to worry about the human factor.

Ryland

Heh, no it would not had the forums not had years of reserves. What it brings in for advertising revenue is public, just check the closed auction threads to see what it could support.


I wasn't asking for something that you spent 20 minutes or more figuring out, I meant a rough figure, because for someone who knows what they are doing, you are either grossly overestimating the forum's budget or underestimating the cost of setting up multiple datacenters in various countries and the unpleasantness that would come with that. The forum could support a single full time employee perhaps, not multiple + building expenses + interesting tax implications for owning physical property, and more tax issues for having physical property in multiple countries. I'm no expert on the matter, but even with absurdly and unreasonably low cost assumptions, we are still vast sums of money apart. I could set up a datacenter in a shed in my backyard for $5k. If Theymos wants to take me up on that offer, I'd be happy to oblige.

Tell me then, how much would it cost to set up a datacenter in a couple of countries, buy the equipment, and hire employees? I think you are vastly overestimating how much the advertising revenue brought in could support.

I suppose its not entirely out of the question, but collocating our own equipment probably isn't the best idea either. It would be less than cost effective, and forum up time and reliability would be far less than it is with professional datacenters. What country to place the datacenter would be another issue, and hiring employees to manage it doesn't sound too appealing. It sounds like a complete mess, and something unnecessary for a forum. This is a website, a large one at that, but the Bitcoin forum isn't Google.

Staff accounts aren't left inactive for too long. Sometimes people just don't have the time to moderate the forums and their accounts are demoted, at least until they come back. I'd imagine especially since the hack, staff accounts have been demoted to reduce what damage the hackers could do if they got a staff account.

Yep, donations and such are to fix issues in time of need. Some issues though aren't fixed by throwing all of your money at them. For example, this recent hack, there is no reasonable solution that Theymos could have done to prevent this. If you know the solution, let us know  

I didn't say that moderating was hard, it just takes time. My point was that moderators are still technically volunteers, the staff (Theymos included) aren't bleeding the forums dry of funds. Donations have never been used to pay any Moderators/Admins, and funds or lack of funds isn't the issue. People hack websites that are targets, Bitcointalk is a target. The fact that the hackers didn't find a vulnerability in the site, and instead targeted the host says a lot. Facebook was hacked with a 1.05 Billion dollar private datacenter. We could spend every last penny to set up a tiny data center on an isolated island and hire one armed guard to prevent this same issue from happening again, but we can't really say that is reasonable solution.

*edit*


Donators were told that Donations would be used for new forum software, which is in production. I meant that donator's funds have never been touched by Staff/Admins.

Again, how would you increase security? There isn't a hole in which to throw money that gives you what you want. New more secure forum software is in production, but it wouldn't have helped in this case.



The forums does have multiple hosts to help mitigate DDOS attacks. One of those hosts is what allowed the latest hack to happen.

The Staff and Admins split somewhere around 10-15% of monthly advertising revenues. Donators funds have never been touched. Mod payments aren't considered salaries, they are considered tips as they aren't guaranteed, and for the time spent moderating, staff members are far better off getting a minimum wage job at a McDonalds. It is however a nice gesture, and a result of the forums not really needing any more money (the same reason donations are no longer solicited).

Yeah, Bitcointalk is one of the larger forums in the world, I don't know the actual statistic, but I'm sure it gets a lot more attempted attacks than is publicly known. I dont think the forum's track record is all that bad though, two or three hacks come to mind in 5 years. Some DDOS too, but you can't really prevent that.


Heh, what do you think that money that is made hand over nutsack is used for? Creating new forum software, security bounties, etc.

Accounts can't be deleted. Change your password to something incredibly secure, delete your posts, and make sure your email is secure.

1) Not sure about various fonts/styling options that will be available
2) Current open source software doesn't fit the forum's needs. The SMF software that the forum uses now is very old and very heavily modified. It has taken Theymos and others a ton of time to develop custom things that make the forum usable, but it prevents the forum from ever being updated. New software is being built from the ground up so that this wont be a problem in the future.
3) There is a reputation system. Check out the Trust system in any market related board, or check Meta, there is always discussion about it.
4) I don't think I can answer why individuals decide to stop using their accounts. I'm sure they have their own reasons, so its up to them.
5) Open source is sort of what the Bitcoin movement is about.
6) The UI for the new forum isn't being developed yet, but once functionality is taken care of, we have UI guys who will make any visuals needed.
7) Cloudflare will not be used as it requires giving the forum's keys to a 3rd party company, making it much more vulnerable to security breaches.
Bitcointalk is hosted on multiple servers. That is our anti DDOS solution at the moment.
9) Because it was necessary to get the job done right. The Forums had the money, and it doesn't need anything besides new forum software, why not get the best possible? There is no ETA because we make arbitrary guesses, and then people get mad when what is pretty much just a guess is wrong.
10) Yes, there will be 2FA
11) No
12) Any number divided by zero can be assumed to be a value approaching an infinite asymptotic value.