I agree. Discourse seems clunky and very sparse in features. I never used it for a long period of time, though. What things did you find most annoying? Was it just the fact that you lost 80% of your previous forum software's features?

There's something about the UIs of a lot of modern websites that I don't like. I can't quite put my finger on what it is, though. Too much wasted space, maybe? Not enough info on each page?

Also see this wiki page that I wrote recently:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Full_node

You didn't...

There's no set schedule. New major versions are released when the developers think that the new features are useful and stable enough for general use. Minor versions are bugfixes and other very minor changes. Historically, major versions have been supported for at least two years (ie, they get security updates and should remain compatible with the rest of the network), though this is not guaranteed.

I think that 0.10 is basically in feature freeze. A release candidate should be coming any day now. Then there will probably be at least a few weeks of public testing before the real release.

That's terrible news. He didn't do anything ethically wrong.

Throughout all this, I've been wondering how much he was actually complicit in the Silk Road stuff. Apparently he knew that btcking had something to do with the Silk Road, but was it just a bit of passing knowledge, or was he actually very purposefully trying to help btcking with money laundering? I'd feel better if it was the latter, since at least he'd have known the risks ahead of time.

Report only one or two posts (the most spammy ones), but note in your report that all of the user's posts are bad.

Thanks.

Language sections are named "[local name for language] ([English name for language])". Is Hrvatski the correct name for the language(s) in all three languages? If not, what are the three words for the languages in the three languages? Or is there some other single word that means "Croatian/Serbian/Bosnian"?

I missed this originally. Is this true? Should I rename the board to something that combines all three languages? If so, what should it be called?

The forum sells ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page. About 25% of ad income goes to the forum moderators as thanks for all of their work. (There are many moderators, so each moderator gets only a small amount -- moderators should be seen as volunteers, not employees.) The rest is stored in the forum's treasury (verifiably), where it sits until the forum needs it.

Ads are allowed to contain any non-annoying HTML/CSS style. No images, JavaScript, or animation (no marquee or blinking). Ads must appear 3 or fewer lines tall in my browser (Firefox, 700px wide). Ad text may not contain lies, misrepresentation, or inappropriate language. Ads may not link directly to any NSFW page. Ads may be rejected for other reasons, and I may remove ads even after they are accepted.

There are 10 total ad slots which are randomly rotated. So one ad slot has a one in ten chance of appearing. Eight of the slots are for sale here. Ads appear only on topic pages with more than one post, and only for people using the default theme.

The ad lasts at least 7 days starting from when I put it up. (However, if you look at the ad history you'll see that ads usually get at least 8 days, and sometimes as many as 10, but this is random and definitely not guaranteed.)

Stats

Exact historical impression counts per slot:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adstats

Info about the current ad slots:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adinfo

Ad blocking

Hero members, Donators, VIPs, and moderators have the ability to disable ads. I don't expect many people to use this option. These people don't increase the impression counts for your ads.

I try to bypass Adblock Plus filters as much as possible, though this is not guaranteed. It is difficult or impossible for ABP filters to block the ad space itself without blocking posts. However, filters can match against the URLs in your links, your CSS classes and style attributes, and the HTML structure of your ads.

To prevent matches against URLs: I have some JavaScript which fixes links blocked by ABP. You must tell me if you want this for your ads. When someone with ABP and JavaScript enabled views your ads, your links are changed to a special randomized bitcointalk.org URL which redirects to your site when visited. People without ABP are unaffected, even if they don't have JavaScript enabled. The downsides are:
- ABP users will see the redirection link when they hover over the link, even if they disable ABP for the forum.
- Getting referral stats might become even more difficult.
- Some users might get a warning when redirecting from https to http.

To prevent matching on CSS classes/styles: Don't use inline CSS. I can give your ad a CSS class that is randomized on each pageload, but you must request this.

To prevent matching against your HTML structure: Use only one <a> and no other tags if possible. If your ads get blocked because of matching done on something inside of your ad, you are responsible for noticing this and giving me new ad HTML.

Auction rules

Post your bids in this thread. Prices must be stated in BTC per slot. You must state the max number of slots you want. When the auction ends, the highest bidders will have their slots filled until all eight slots are filled.

I reserve the right to reject bids, even days after the bid is made. In particular, bids from people with less than 15 activity points are likely to be rejected. I recommend not getting into a bidding war with someone who has less than 15 activity points, as their bids might not be accepted, but your latest bids will still stand. If you need to know right away whether someone's bids will be accepted, PM me.

So if someone bids for 8 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 8 slots. If the two highest bids are 8 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 7 slots and the second person will get 1 slot.

The notation "2 @ 5" means 2 slots for 5 BTC each. Not 2 slots for 5 BTC total.

- When you post a bid, the bids in your previous posts are considered to be automatically canceled. You can put multiple bids in one post, however.
- All bid prices must be evenly divisible by 0.05.
- The bidding starts at 0.50.
- I will end the auction at an arbitrary time no more than 12 days from now. (I will probably end the auction 1-3 days before the ads are scheduled to go up.)
- If two people bid at the same price, the person who bid first will have his slots filled first.
- Bids are considered invalid and will be ignored if they do not specify both a price and a max quantity, or if they could not possibly win any slots

If these rules are confusing, look at some of the past forum ad auctions to see how it's done.

You must pay for your slots within 24 hours of receiving the payment address. Otherwise your slots may be sold to someone else, and I might even give you a negative trust rating. I will send you the payment information via forum PM from this account ("theymos", user ID 35). You might receive false payment information from scammers pretending to be me. They might even have somewhat similar usernames. Be careful.

Auction ended. Final result:

Slots BTC/Slot Person
4 3.35 MariaQin
3 3.30 FortuneJack
1 3.30 InspiredEye

I don't think so. If that was possible, then people who used the flat view would likely respond to the wrong people all the time, ruining things for people who used the threaded view.

Croatian board created.

Croatian now has its own board. See Hrvatski (Croatian).

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25215.0

The money hasn't moved:
http://blockexplorer.com/address/1PFkqgBBrSKikyyUGDerZMfzvCNPgKrR3o

I was never able to locate his family, though I haven't had time to pursue this as much as I'd like. (The language barrier also makes this especially difficult.) If someone else wants to look into it, feel free. If the money is returned, I'd be willing to use at least 25 BTC of it to reward the people who helped recover it. However, under no circumstances should you harass his friends/family, and I'm not going to give any reward to people who do so.

Unfortunately, even if his family is located, it's likely that they won't be able to recover the BTC.

I was thinking that it might not be totally useless for the forum to encrypt PMs using JavaScript. This might discourage subpoenas, at least. The forum would be technically capable of decrypting messages in almost all cases by changing the JavaScript, though, so you wouldn't be able to rely on this encryption. Also, the messages would be lost if you forgot your forum password, so enabling encryption by default might be too dangerous for the average user.

This won't be in the first version of the new forum software.

That idea is fine, but I don't have time to implement it right now.


Put just "e" in the search box.

I have 734 pages of PMs. It's sometimes a little difficult to navigate, though generally not too bad. I do resort to SQL queries sometimes, so I can understand why someone would want a dump of all of the messages for more in-depth searching/analysis.

I will not be accepting ads for BITMIXER.IO in this or future ad rounds until further notice.


You're too new. PM me first.

Current status:

Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 2.50 BTCBook.eu
1 2.00 casinobitcoin
2 1.95 Micio
4 1.90 FortuneJack

The auction continues.

That list is ordered by user ID, not added time.


Any inaccuracies will eventually be fixed. I'm not going to allow the default trust network to contain inaccurate ratings for long.

Right. After rating someone, I'm thinking that you'd get a prompt something like:


I'd hope that most users would read/understand this to an acceptable degree and therefore be able to create a halfway-decent trust list, though maybe not. Another possibility is that most people would only add people to their trust lists who themselves have hardly anyone on their trust lists, which would create a bad trust network for everyone.

I can't really predict what would happen. I do find the current situation somewhat undesirable, though: I didn't create this really fancy Trust system so that everyone would just use DefaultTrust.

I've been thinking about adding a feature where once you give someone a positive rating, you'll be asked if you want to add that person to your trust list, and doing so would also remove DefaultTrust from your trust list if you haven't edited it previously. I'm worried that this will just make everyone appear to have negative trust for most users, though. I'm not sure that the Trust system is powerful/correct enough to handle the errors that most people will make in choosing who to put on their trust lists. Ideally, the ratings you see should be correct as long as most of the users in your trust list are not totally evil/incompetent and at least a few really know what they're doing. Certainly this wouldn't have happened before, but maybe it would now due to the untrust feature. On the other hand, I think that there are only a few people on the forum who actually know how the Trust system works, and I'm not sure how likely they are to be widely trusted under this "auto-trust" system.