Does this ICPenny only do penny auctions?

Or, like Ashop, does it also do normal shopping and normal auctions?

This Ashop seems pretty full-featured... It can also integrate with your ebay shop and various other third party things like forums and gosh knows what else.

But hey if you want to set up a ICPenny site fine, once you put the source on github or whatever so we can all grab it we can all check it out too, give it a whirl, and see which has what features and all that.

-MarkM-

I don't recall having seen prior to your above post any confirmation here that your username over there is the same person who uses that username here, so do not recall having upgraded that user over there to full member. I can go do that now...

...Which reminds me that Cyclos supports websites being able to sell stuff for its currencies. So maybe we can make its payment provider service work with the Ashop system so that paying using DVCbank can be one of the payment options for the penny auctions...

Could be worth a bounty, even, for some skillfull programmer?

Hmm, y'know, I do not actually see you over on the Cyclos site neither as an inactive member (the default that peopel start as) nor as a full member (which is the category I upgrade them to once I confirm who they are).

Oops, reading backscroll I see you didn't use same username. Ok I will check for jags then.

Hmm maybe confirm email too since assuming if email doesn't work that username here would work won't do the trick should an admin end up needign to contact you for any reason.

-MarkM-

It takes you to index.php now because I beat you to the install script.

The install script is install.php but maybe does not need deleting for security purposes like in some pages, since now that I have already run the install it now demands the admin password instead of being left wide open.

I think if we want to use this thing we need to convince one or more of the cryptocoin payment gateway services to support it.

It has a huge list of payment methods you can use, but none of the cryptocoin ones seem to be on the list yet.

Since we want to use DeVCoins, we should approach whichever cryptocoin pyment gateway services support DeVCoins.

However it would certainly do no harm for all of the cryptocoin payment services to get themselves added into this thing's list of supported payment methods.

Right now about the only no-chargebacks-possible payment method I see there is manual payment, along the lines of "send us a cheque" or "some to this thread and communite with an admin to send the admin some DeVCoins" or whatever.

Also, when you click on items it tries to take you to a page about that item, which page does not exist.

I tried to use their page manager and tell it to generate the pages but evidently that is not resulting in generated pages.

It is true that this is just a test so far, because it is on a shared hosting site where I put web stuff.

I have not yet set up any webservers on any of my dedicated servers because until now there I had no web based app that would use so myuch traffic that this little shares hosting account would not be able to handle.

If we can get a lot of users, so many that this shared hosting would not be able to handle the load, then it can be moved to another hostname on a dedicated server.

(This hostname and domain name belong to the hosting company, they have a bunch of domaisn they let users create hosts on and the onlinewebshop domain seemed the most appropriate of them for this particular app.)

This thing does regular auctions and regular just plain selling of stuff as well as penny auctions.

Where it starts to cost is if you want for example the back office thing for your staff to use to handle all the dealing with vendors and so on, stuff like that.

It seems actually a very good system so probably should be well worth any cryptocoin payment service provider's while to get integrated into it.

It was easy to set up the existing sample items that came with it as penny auctions but where I am running into problems is how are people going to pay when buying bundles of bids and how do I get the darn product-pages to work, They are page not found right now. Also without those per product pages it is not even clear how to get an item into your shopping cart.

-MarkM-

If your people whose thigs are pools and block-explorers haven't enough knowledge to do a simple altcoin hack you probably need new people for those positions too.

You maybe should also look at those automated sites that generate altcoins, they might be cheaper than hiring a programmer.

Though sounds like you are going be an endless source of hours-of-work for some lucky programmer provided you pay well.

-MarkM-

I am setting up a penny auction site at http://pennyauction.onlinewebshop.net so we can take a look at it and see whether it will suit our purposes and figure out what would need to be done to it if anything to make it more suitable for us than it is when it comes out of the box.

I see one nasty thing about it right away:

Anyone could drop by right now and configure it, they are being sent directly to the configure script so they don't even need to go find the source code and look up what the install script would be called and where it would be hidden in order to check whether I had gotten around to removing it yet.

So by the time I have the database set up and all the php files uploaded someone else could easily have come along and told it some database on a machine of theres to run on, then gone on to do gosh knows what other configuring of it.

So far I haven't seen any instructions like "make sure to set your own browser's IP address in such and such a file before uploading it, so that the install script can only be run from the browser you are at..." nor "set a password in such and such a file before uploading it, to restrict who can use the install script to people who know the password you specified."

-MarkM-

If you know how to code the pool, the blockchain explorer and such then you already know most of the things you need to code the coin itself, surely?

Since you need various facts from the code in order to set up pools and block explorers correctly to work with that code...

-MarkM-

A lot of the writing about it though is factual accounts of what scientists did and said.

Or purportedly at least approximately factual, anyway. Newton's purported apple might be a myth or legend but that he came up with a theory about gravity seems likely to be true. Unless he stole someone else's idea...

So maybe you start to see why fact versus fiction is a can of worms we might be better off not getting into.

-MarkM-

I have created categories for Free Open Source and for Proprietary, that seems a more useful distinction.

-MarkM-

Re over-thinking it:

Not at all. On the contrary, maybe others are under-thinking it.

A science article that contains false statements of fact is thereby fictional.

Also, writing lies and writing truths both require the same writing skills, it is only the journalistic/research skills or application of those skills that differ.

Given the fictional facts or the nonfictional facts, writing about them is still just writing about them.

So maybe a better distinction would be reporting versus coming up with ideas / facts / topics to report.

So the distinction isn't really in the writing, it is in who you interview or what source material you consult in order to come up with the "facts" (or fictions) that you are to write about.

Also a factual account of what actually happened on a fictional planet, or in the Oz that Dorothy visited, etcetera, is different from a fictional account of what happened there.

A factual account of what happened to Dorothy in Oz is maybe something along the lines of a precis or summary or re-write of what happened to Dorothy in Oz.

A fictional account of what happened to Dorothy in Oz is maybe a new Oz book, a whole new adventure, Dorothy's adventures in Oz being continued or extended by a new author, which only becomes "factual" if it becomes "canon".

-MarkM-

It doesn't seem to have sub-categories.

Each category has a parent, but i do not seem to be able to change the parent from "Main category" to, e.g., "Products" or "Services"...

Oops never mind, I found out how to do it...

Trying to separate fiction from non-fiction is I think too awkward to attempt, because a large part (or what used once upon a time to be a large part, anyway) of Devtome's content directly involves the whole fourth wall and what is considered fiction by who kind of stuff.

Earth is a fictional planet, for example, according to various other planets, most of whom are regarded themselves by most inhabitants of Earth as fictional...

-MarkM-

I should maybe note too that I am not actually the admin, as in my own username on the system is not flagged as an admin.

The actual admin that came with the system is still the only admin, and I happen to be the only person who has its password.

That is probably not quite the same thing as simply having my own username flagged as an admin, for example if there is fine grained control over each and every thing one can flag a user as having an admin power over then likely this built in original admin has it all flagged.

So it might be kind of like a "root user" in Unix: an account one actually should try very hard to never actually use nor even maybe need to use.

There seems to be an abstraction layer between fine grained controls and types of user, so that an active admin user means a user having certain powers, an active full member user has different powers and so on.

So it might be possible to make a type of user labelled an advertising admin, and assign to that type various powers relating to advertising.

users seem maybe to be of only one type at a time though, if so a full member would be distinct from an advertising admin and probably an advertising admin should be a separate username distinct from someone's full member username and should not need all the powers of a full member only the various powers relating to ads.

Etc for other separations of function.

-MarkM-

It doesn't. It is a community currency bank type of program. It has clients for all the phones, the ability to let people sell things for the currency on their websites and all that kind of stuff, but never heard of cryptocoins.

Having people create modules for deposit and disbursement of cryptocoins would be nice things to offer bounties for, heck maybe even just continuing work on the free open source version now that - or when - the original developers move on to a proprietary version might be a darn good thing for DevCoin to consider supporting...

This is part of why I worry about admins.

I need to figure out whether I can give people the ability to admin the ads for example without the ability to change anyone's balances.

With Open Transactions people's balances cannot be changed without them signing off on the change.

Normal banks that is not the case.

I do not want to record on my Open Transactions server that The Bank of Devcoin, or DVCbank, or DVCcyclos or whatever I am going to call it on the Open Transactions side has X number of (digi)DeVCoins, by locking up the corresponding dDVC (digiDeVCoins) on the Open Transactions server, only to find later that on the Cyclos side they issued more than that many DeVCoins of balances to their users.

Unless it is in fact agreed that the DVCbank will operate on a fractional reserve basis, of course.

I am thinking maybe it would be useful if any withdraw from Cyclos type of functions can be locked up in the event a user has an outstanding loan, so that loaned balances cannot stray beyond the confines of the Cyclos system. That way even if they do go fractional reserve they won't actually leak any DeVCoins (or digiDevCoins, which is really what I plan to have the Cyclos balances represent).

There are so far only 210 million digiDeVCoins (dDVC) issued on the Open Transactions server, corresponding to real DeVCoins I have in wallets.

There is no withdrawing from those wallets. Hot wallet functionality is totally distinct from and over-and-above those cold wallet coins.

The cold coins are intended to be frozen "forever", that is, until I foresee no future need for any dDVC to exist.

Hot wallets are thus in addition to those 100% reserves, so that even if a hot wallet vanished the dDVC tokens in the Open Transactions system would still continue to each represent one whole DeVCoin frozen in a wallet.

Ideally hotwallet services (the buying and selling of the dDVC tokens for/with actual on the blockchain DeVCoins) would be done by third parties.

-MarkM-

Currently I am admin but it can support designating more people as admins.

I dunno what exactly an admin can do with regards to ads.

I don't even recall what default ad-categories it came with.

What categories do we need?

-MarkM-

I guess you need to hire people for that.

If you know you can get a field of potatoes planted tended harvested and delivered for X DeVCoins you will be in a position to predict how many DeVCoins you need to charge per pound of potatoes.

Though futures markets would also help for crops, in case the weather does you a nasty.

You'd need to contract the workers for a full crop cycle though or use futures to hedge against strikes and such as well as the weather.

By the way Namecoins and Litecoins are both on nice downswings of price on Vircurex; since both seem likely to go back up again at least once before dying completely this seems a good time to have lowball buy offers going down and down and down into lower and lower prices, wating to pick up some bargains ready for the next upswing...

-MarkM-

It is them calculating in dollars. Have you ever watched what happens with coins that the masses know of no drop dead simple way to turn into fiat?

Have you noticed they always want an exchange to/from fiat first before even a place to buy coffee or food or clothing or shelter with the coin?

I assumed the gold-farmers would be looking for gold they can sell for dollars, otherwise presumably they would already be flooding into the CPU mining concept to mine gold they can sell for DeVCoins or Litecoins or Bitcoins or Martian Botcoins or United Kingdom Britcoins or Canadian Digital Notes or whatever...

For the programmers, presumably they are probably doing code-monkey level stuff to try to get some fiat, otherwise they would do much cleverer stuff heck even just doing a quick hack job on a foocoin->barcoin scale would likely make them more money faster, or being the one who hires codemonkeys to make code be more lucrative (assuming they actually have good ideas of what to have built instead of just coding skills without any idea what would actually be profitable if built.)

-MarkM-

If we pick the programs we pay people to develop correctly, western programmers should haveno  problem moving on from writing profitable programs for X dollars an hour to running profitably programs written by others for X/10 or whatever dollars an hour?

The trick lies in the design/determination of what programs will be profitable to run, not in how cheaply you can hire yourself out as a code-monkey (typing ape?), presumably.

-MarkM-

Namecoin has been dropping nicely on Vircurex, eating lower and lower and lower into my lowball buy offers.

Considering its next pump will likely go at least as high as the last one it is nice to see people dumping them cheaper and cheaper and cheaper on me each one that they buy...

Plus, there is not much chance Namecoin is on its last final dying dump, unlike some other coins maybe best left un-named...

-MarkM-

If your anti-whatever tool has a whitelist at all, presumably it will say somewhere in its help or documentation how to go about making use of it?

-MarkM-

Its still a late start, better to get in on the dump phase, there are enough coins that there is sually one going down while antoher is going up.

This one is going up, its the time to have sell orders in place not the time to place buy orders.

Basically if you are buying on the way up you are one of the "greater fools" being dumped on by those who already bought thus decided it was time to start the pump phase.

In other words if it is going up that is actually the dump phase for the people who already had the coin thus started the pump.

When it is going down that is the buy in phase for those planning to participate in a pump instead of being dumped on during the so called pump.

The words are misleading, the so called pump is really the dump, the so called dump is actually the stock up ready for a pump phase.

(Unless it is the terminal dump of a dying coin.)

"Expecting 100 any day now" means, or should mean, "my sell orders are at 100 and up", not "now is the time to buy" but, rather, "assuming you already own some, placing them as sells lower than 100 might be selling them off cheaper than necessary".

It also though probably means they don't really expect it to reach 100, instead their sell orders are probably much much closer to the current going rate and they are not so much trying to get you to buy their 100 satoshi sells but their current sells sitting right about where the current dumping price is.

They probably want you to buy at current price imagining it will go to 100, while they are selling to you before it reaches 100 since they want to dump them on you before you realise it is not afterall going to go much higher.

-MarkM-

Who do you think you are buying it from when you buy on the way up?

The people who already have their sell orders in place?

Or do you only place buy side orders never buying from the sell side already in place orders?

Go get your buy orders in on the way down on a coin they are not currently pumping up.

And/or place your lowball buy orders on this one to catch it on the way down if you think this is not just a one-shot pump but that they actually will keep on pumping it again and again and again trying to make it seem like something that might, if only due to their obsessively repeated pumps, end up lasting.

-MarkM-