There's a warning on selfmod topics, anyone scamming should pretty quickly get red trust if you post about it in Scam Accusations, and I can quickly recover any deleted posts if necessary. I don't see how it significantly helps scammers.

Email.

I don't have any special way of contacting him. I don't know anything about his current status.

equinox9 offered to buy the forum for £10,000. LOL.

Fixed.

sminers can bid up to a total of 10 BTC.

I needed to lock the messages table for a few minutes. It should be OK now.

This transaction doesn't significantly affect taxes AFAIK. By "selling" bitcoins in this way, a lot of USD income was made via capital gains, but it immediately became an expense. The net income is zero for this transaction. Appropriate taxes (determined by a professional) will be paid, of course.

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.

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 frequently get 1-2 extra days, 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.

Auction ended. Final result:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 1.55 MakeBTC
2 1.50 ConceptPending
1 1.50 demontn
1 1.50 victorhing
1 1.45 PBmining
1 1.40 ByronP
1 1.30 topminingcontracts


I very rarely give away slots.


You're too new, sorry. PM me next time and I'll give you an address where you can deposit BTC in advance for bids.

Are they running into the PMs per hour limit or the 360-second limit?

(The 360-second limit is reduced if you whitelist them, BTW.)

That's probably caused by an ad blocker.

The auction system is written in Node. It will be able to be used with the new software without much modification.

The forum understands this as my OR little OR bitcoin. Surround it when quotes and you'll get the desired thread as the first result.

That only appears for you. Reload the page and it'll be gone.

On pages where your session code is sent via GET, links are disabled like that. Otherwise, if you clicked on a https link, your session code might be sent in the referrer.

Yes, though I assume he did that in the code. It should be user-configurable.

I've decided not to create an official announcement thread today. But I will answer some questions.


I've answered this before.

The forum was created by Satoshi and Sirius. Without any explicit agreement or assignment of ownership, it came to be the case that I am now chiefly responsible for forum management. The domain is owned by Sirius. I have no way of forcing him to do anything with it. (Though I recently did gain partial access so that I can change DNS records.) I control a lot of the forum's money. Sirius cannot force me to do anything with this. Various treasurers control other forum money; they're bound by the treasury agreements.

I am not a lawyer, so I can't say for sure who the forum's owner is legally-speaking, and this is irrelevant to me unless I'm dealing with legal stuff.


I've answered this many times.

I control most of the money. I consider it my responsibility to appropriately manage this money for the non-profit benefit of the forum, Bitcoin, and the world. I take this responsibility seriously. However, I retain sole control over how the money is spent. No one has any right to influence my decisions, though I can be convinced by reasonable arguments.

The rest of the money is held by treasurers bound by the treasury agreements. Under the treasury agreements, I have a lot of decision-making power, but I can be over-ruled in some cases.

Again, talk to a lawyer if you want to know who owns the money according to governments. I don't care about this unless I have to.


No. I avoid the term "non-profit" in official materials to avoid giving the impression that a government has assigned the forum with a non-profit label, but the term does accurately represent the philosophy of the forum. No one gets or will ever get any kind of dividend from forum revenue.


The most popular forum software is:
- Old.
- Written in PHP, which sucks.
- Written insecurely and messily.
- Difficult to modify, especially safely.
- Not much more featureful than SMF, if at all.

There are a handful of newer forum software packages which solve some of those problems, but all of them are very sparse in features.

The goal of this software project is to create new, open source forum software which will compete with SMF, phpBB, etc.


This isn't completely defined yet. It'll have almost all features that we have now. A main goal will be improving filtering and data presentation so that users can more easily manage the flood of posts both board-wide and within threads, while simultaneously reducing the need for centralized moderation.


The total cost will probably be around $1 million. The $350,000 covers several months of work, after which I will evaluate the performance of Slickage Studios and choose whether or not to continue. In any case, the code will be open source, so no work will be lost.


About one year from now.


No.


Yes, there will be 2FA.


Maybe. I don't see any harm in that if it isn't too difficult/expensive.


Yes, though some advanced functionality may be unavailable without JavaScript.


Some of the treasurers do store funds for free, but extremely-trustworthy people who will do this are rare.

I cannot conceive of any case in which I would return donations. The forum is not a bank that holds money for years before returning it (after a substantial value increase).

After the forum software project is taken care of and I'm sure that the money is really not needed, I may allow donators to assign their donation to some Bitcoin-accepting non-profit organization. If I do this, it will only be possible for a one-time period of a few months. Otherwise, donated funds would be worthless because donators could at any time remove their donations from the forum's control.


First: Where did I say that I would use all of the donated funds for any particular project? When you donated, the Donate page said something like, "Donations will mostly be used for forum software development." The Donate topic made no mention of forum software. At various points I said things like "I intend to get forum software created soon," which was true at the time, but I never said that I definitely would do it soon.

Second: I am using the money for forum software development, so your complaint is ridiculous. It is not ridiculous (though IMO incorrect) to criticize exactly how I'm spending forum money toward achieving this goal, but you donated knowing that I alone was responsible for managing donated funds without any oversight except such oversight that I create. The Donate page has always said, "Donated funds are managed by theymos."

I admit that it was never particularly my plan to wait years before spending donated funds (though my belief in Bitcoin's long-term value influenced my conservative spending), but this ended up creating loads of money for the forum, so I don't feel too bad about it.

You have a Donator section and a special icon. The details of the Donator section were never specified. In fact, I always phrased these perks like this: "If you become a Donator/VIP, then you get access to these perks." Notice that I do not promise that the perks will last forever; only that you will, for a time, receive them.

Yes.

No.


Yes.