In order to collect more money for the creation of good forum software and for other useful purposes, the forum is selling ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page.

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. Ads will be prefixed with "Advertisement:". 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. Seven 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 seven slots are filled.

So if someone bids for 7 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 7 slots. If the two highest bids are 7 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 6 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 0.25.
- 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. I also post periodic status updates which should help make things clear.

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 5 BitcoinVideoPoker
1 5 savantguy
5 4.75 Inaba

I enabled this for a short time in the past, but for some reason I disabled it again. I don't remember why.

The generated HTML seems valid to me.

Old hosting bills and other expenses (SSL certs, etc.).

Insubstantial posts like that are off-topic and should be deleted in any case.

- More money is better than less money. I'm not going to turn down donations when people want to donate. (Though when asked, I often recommend that people not donate.) I'm not going to stop selling ads even though the forum probably has "enough" money. It's not bad for the forum to have extra money. It will be used on something useful at some point. If you don't like this, don't donate.
- More than half of the forum's money is from ads, not donations.
- During the school year, I am a full time student. I barely have time to administrate the forum.
- When I do have time, there are many interesting/important/fun things that compete for my attention. I don't spend all day working on the forum. I've certainly not been working full-time for 12 months on vaporware forum software...

I am still very interested in creating new forum software, and we probably now have enough money to do it. SMF works alright (definitely not perfectly), but there are two main problems with it that require more than just some modifications. Firstly, the coding style is generally insecure. It's very easy to introduce new security flaws, and it's likely that SMF has unknown security flaws. Secondly, modifications to SMF are somewhat difficult, and some types of modifications are so difficult that they will almost certainly never be done here. (Other forum software isn't significantly better, from what I've seen.)

There is unfortunately no magical machine which takes money and creates excellent software or hires a team of competent people. I'm not quite sure how best to turn the money into a good software product. I originally intended to give someone a bunch of money and have them handle the whole thing. I talked with dozens of people interested in doing this, but none of them made me totally confident. A while ago I decided that I will probably never be confident in any one person/company handling the entire project because I've thought about it much longer than they have (2 years), and I have many details about how it should work in my mind. So I probably need to get closer to the development process. My current plan is to write some detailed up-to-date specifications and do some of the high-level architectural work (DB tables, primarily) and then lead a team to do the rest.

I have a little more time now, but the forum software project is a somewhat low priority. I have several high-priority things to fix with the current software. If you want to help, I could use a very security-conscious PHP programmer to help me maintain/improve the current SMF installation.

I strongly support Matthew's decision to leave the forum forever in protest of these mod payments. What a hero.


Right.

Mtgox Live was developed by coderrr, I believe. rasengan was involved in some other way.

The forum's server is actually hosted by nforce.nl. I'm not sure how easy it would be for the US government to force PIA to do anything regarding the server. They aren't really the forum's ISP. The server is a gift from PIA to the forum. They don't have root access or anything, though because they pay the bills, they probably have ultimate control over the server in the eyes of nforce.nl. Maybe this situation could be improved.

rasengan had something to do with MtGox Live, which was later acquired by MtGox. PIA is not owned by MtGox.

I noticed that when I wrote that obfuscation code. There may be a more general CSS selector that you can use.


The Ignore and Trust features aren't (fully) implemented on BlackBox. You can see when people edit their posts on the default theme. The time under their post will have a dotted underline, and hovering your mouse over it gives you the edit time.

Sections need to be vendor-neutral. What do you think of:

Mining
    Hardware
        [directly in Hardware: ASIC, etc.]
        Low-performance hardware (CPU, GPU, etc.)
        Group buys

I'll move everything currently in Hardware directly to Low-performance and everything in Custom Hardware to Hardware.

Are more sections than this needed?

Having http images (or https images with invalid certificates) on an https site results in warnings on a lot of browsers. I allow it with [img] tags because they're more rare.

Some day I'd like to have something like:


which would cause the forum to periodically fetch the textual data from the given URL and insert it into the post. This is a very low priority, though.

It doesn't work correctly. A user style is better.


Screenshot? Maybe I can help.

An account-stealing Java exploit has been going around lately. You might have run into this, though I'm not sure whether this exploit allows the attacker to change your account settings.

Is it under your control now? Your email address is currently the same as it was before.

Logic fail.


No.

You asked who owned the forum, and I gave you a detailed answer. Someone who can't shut down a site clearly doesn't own it, wouldn't you say? No one person can shut down the forum, so I like to say that no one owns the forum. Alternatively, you could maybe say that the forum is owned by a corporation-like entity with a very unusual structure.