Yeah, it is frustrating.  It may have been worth going with an open-source version back at the beginning, but I think at this point we're far enough along that we may as will stick with Stack Exchange.


Thanks guys. 

We're trying to launch such a site right now.  Please join up to help it go faster: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/30763/bitcoin-crypto-currency

Uh, you should probably read about what "groupthink" actually means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

Oh right, did I mention the groupthink?  That's another reason why this forum is terrible.

I was going to suggest checking with the Russian Business Network, but it looks like this forum has aspiring cybercriminals of its own.  Fucking hell.

There are plenty of normal people interested in and curious about Bitcoin.  They go looking for more information, end up here, and start to have second thoughts because of the political kookery and general idiocy that they find here.

There's no reason that the Bitcoin project should have an official libertarian/anarchist/conspiracy theorist/right-winger forum.  If you want to promote Bitcoin to those groups, do it on their forums.


Don't need money, just need more participants.

On the other hand, if I could pay to have forum.bitcoin.org shut down right now, I'd do it.

It's considered terrible by the core devs because it's a fucking cesspool, and they are sane enough to realize this.  This place is full of political kooks who don't know when to keep their mouths shut, trolls looking for lulzy interactions with said kooks, and "double your BTC!" hucksters.  It's all presided over by a mostly "laissez-faire" moderation team and an absentee admin.  The place looks really bad to outsiders, and it's showing no signs of doing anything except getting progressively worse.

I get the political angle, but it's not worth ruining Bitcoin's public image in order to push your ideology.  We need to be tactful about how we present it.  For a general audience, that means you have to at least pretend that Bitcoin is politically neutral.  Save the "it's going to bring the revolution" stuff for your libertarian friends.

I just wanted to emphasize that.

Your opinion of Bitcoin is "why would they do that?!" ? 

We need a nice popular and user-friendly futures exchange, so that we can direct both the "SELL SELL SELL" and "BUY BUY BUY" types there and tell them to put up or shut up.

Damn, I was hoping the link would just be removed entirely.  At least the Google link doesn't seem to work.

Pretty sure that crash didn't have anything to do with the trolls.  There were several factors involved, all of them more significant than some fools spamming "SELL SELL SELL".

We're still in the commitment stage, so there's nothing to do at the moment other than try to get more people to join.  Stack Exchange requires a certain number of users to commit to using the site before they're launch it.  We're a little more than halfway there.

The skin belongs to the Stack Exchange new site staging area.  The Bitcoin site won't look like that.

I think it's worth it, but take a look at the example questions on the site to get a better idea.  They're not all nitty-gritty technical.  As long as you understand the concept, you can answer the questions of those who don't.  You can also contribute by asking questions, if there are aspects of bitcoin that you'd like to understand better.

EDIT (9/7): Public beta is now open!  Thanks to everyone who helped out!

EDIT (8/30): The site has launched, and is now in the "private beta" phase, which lasts one week.  It will be open to the public on September 6th.  You can see the site right now by going to http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/

EDIT (8/20): "This proposal has reached 100% commitment. We are preparing for its launch and expect to create it soon."  Thanks everyone!  Once the Stack Exchange staff set up the site, there will be a one-week private beta with those that are currently signed up, after which it will be open to the public.

If you want Bitcoin to have a better user support site than these forums, please join the Bitcoin Stack Exchange.

For those who aren't familiar with it, Stack Exchange is a network of question & answer sites, the most well-known of which is stackoverflow.com.  The sites feature a reddit-style reputation system, with high-rep users being granted moderation abilities.  Acceptable and unacceptable topics are also defined in advance for each site.  The Bitcoin SE will be strictly for technical and conceptual questions, not for politics or philosophy.  This should nip trolling and general nonsense in the bud, leaving us with a clean and professional site.

At the time of this writing, we need 71 more people to launch the site, 48 of which need to be established Stack Exchange users.  We've been growing steadily, and should launch around the end of August at this rate.  I'd like to see it happen sooner, so please join up!

EDIT:

We've been getting a lot of people signing up, which is good.  Unfortunately, we're lagging behind on established, high-reputation Stack Exchange users.  In the 4 days since this thread was started, we've gained 21 users, but only 4 of them have 200+ reputation on another Stack Exchange site (3 if you don't count me getting my rep score above 200 during that time).  We need 100 users with 200+ reputation; we're currently at 56.

For those of you who've already signed up, or are just signing up now, please consider participating in one of the existing Stack Exchange sites and building up your reputation.  Getting a score of 200 isn't too difficult, it just takes patience.

Some tips:

Each upvote on a question that you ask is worth 5 points.  Upvotes on your answers are worth 10 points.  Getting your answer accepted as "the answer" by the person who asked the question is worth 15 points.  Answers tend to get upvoted more often than questions, so it's easier to gain reputation from answering questions than from asking them.  Make sure to upvote the questions that you post answers for; it helps those questions get more attention, which means more upvotes for your answer.

Stack Overflow is the most popular of the SE sites, so the pacing tends to be a bit frantic.  Questions will tend to get answered while you're still typing your answer.  If this is a problem for you, consider going with one of the other SE sites instead (I went with Super User).  However, keep in mind that you don't need to be first to answer, you just need to contribute useful information that hasn't been presented yet.

Each tag on an SE site has its own RSS feed.  For example Super User has a bitcoin tag, and here's its RSS feed, found at the bottom of the page.  Watching specific tags that you're interested in is a good way to find questions to answer.

Make sure your account on Area51 (the new site staging area, where the Bitcoin proposal is located) is linked with your other SE accounts, so that your reputation score gets counted.

If you want Bitcoin to have a better user support site than these forums, please join the Bitcoin Stack Exchange.

For those who aren't familiar with it, Stack Exchange is a network of question & answer sites, the most well-known of which is stackoverflow.com.  The sites feature a reddit-style reputation system, with high-rep users being granted moderation abilities.  Acceptable and unacceptable topics are also defined in advance for each site.  The Bitcoin SE will be strictly for technical and conceptual questions, not for politics or philosophy.  This should nip trolling and general nonsense in the bud, leaving us with a clean and professional site.

At the time of this writing, we need 71 more people to launch the site, 48 of which need to be established Stack Exchange users.  We've been growing steadily, and should launch around the end of August at this rate.  I'd like to see it happen sooner, so please join up!

Wouldn't it make more sense to use log scale for the price groupings?  There was still plenty of volatility when the price was below $1.

If you want to stick with Wordpress and eShop, you'll have to write (or hire someone to write) a bitcoin payment gateway for eShop, as one doesn't currently exist.  If you're willing to switch to another shopping cart platform, there are various options available.  I've set up OpenCart with the bitcoin payment module, and it seems to work pretty well.

Sure, but I think it's bad to have our anything-goes dumping ground right out in front, as the public face of the project.  I'm sure bitcointalk.org will be the the first Google result for "bitcoin forum", but I hope it doesn't even make the first page for "bitcoin".  It should be kind of like IRC: it's a wild place, but you only end up there if you go looking for it, and in that case you know what to expect.


Thanks.  Upvoted.

At the rate it's been going, it should open by the end of August.  It would be nice to have it happen before that.  We're currently ahead on new users (119/200), what we need are more people who have an established reputation on other Stack Exchange sites (48/100).


Doubt it.  The SE site is strictly for technical and conceptual stuff, not for political/philosophical stuff.  Nothing interesting for the kooks, and with no kooks there's no lulz for the trolls.  Not to mention that there's a moderation system in place that actually works, unlike with this place.