Thanks. This will update daily:
https://bitcointalk.org/rbitcoin/

This is definitely not true. SMF is written in PHP, and it has a lot of unnecessary inefficiencies (which I've been fixing to keep the forum running). The additional features that I require aren't very resource-intensive, and I don't require some of SMF's resource-intensive features. The most expensive required feature is the web of trust, but that isn't too slow to begin with and it can be made faster with caching.

Maybe it's impossible if you write it in a week using bloated frameworks...


The slowness doesn't bother me much if more hardware can fix it and if the slowness doesn't increase exponentially with more users. However, if you know in advance that your design will be 30% slower, then I probably won't like your design for other reasons. I don't like doing too much at runtime for the sake of coding convenience, and I do like SQL.

The number of people ignoring you dropped too far for that to show up.

I made an error. Should be:
1 2.25 Bogart
1 2.25 bit365
5 2 Inaba

Whoops. 

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=35;sa=pmprefs
Put a * in the text box.

I think it'll eventually stabilize at some value between $100 and $150 and stay there for a while. I wouldn't be surprised if there was another bubble up to $250 or greater. I would be surprised if it went below $100.

The forum's search offers additional features that Google can't replicate.

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 7 days starting from when I put it up.

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

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.

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 results:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 2.25 Bogart
1 2.25 bit365
4 2 Inaba

I think that it is legitimate traffic, but there is a ridiculous amount of it: ~250 requests per second. I made several changes to speed up the forum, which seems to have helped.

Some changes you may notice:
- The users online list at the bottom of the board index is gone. That was too expensive.
- Searching is now subject to the same spam protection limits as posting. So newbies have to wait 6 minutes between searches and users with more posts have to wait progressively less time.
- If you request pages faster than once per second too many times, your IP will be temporarily banned.

I wrote my own caching system because I didn't want to use memcached, etc. There may be bugs with this. In the future I may need to add more aggressive caching.

I unfortunately had to remove that feature because it was too expensive. You can still see a list of who's online here, but the forum will no longer keep track of these records.

You could disable receiving PMs.

Yes. If people could post things through your API, your API would be acting as a proxy, preventing IP bans from being effective. Maybe some solution to this could be figured out, but it makes more sense for API users to send such requests to the forum directly. Clients don't need to process any forum HTML when posting -- they just need to POST specific data to specific URLs and sometimes store the returned cookies. You could write a library to help clients figure out what data to send and where to send it, or your API could return this data.

Cine sa fie moderatorul acestei arii? Este necesar sa cunoasca engleza pentru a putea sa comunic cu el.

---

Who should be moderator of this section? He must be able to speak some English so I can communicate with him.

Yes. I thought it was kind of ridiculous that it's been pinned this long.

This project is still open, and the forum does have 5500+ BTC dedicated to it. The OP of this topic is not quite up-to-date on my expectations, though. I will update it at some point.

I sold him a large number of bitcoins.

If possible, you may want to have API users POST the forum directly so that we don't have to deal with abuse/bans through your API.

Nope. You can verify the forum's balance:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155000.0

All of it is available for this project. However, I now want to be more closely involved in the software creation process than I did when I started this topic. I'm probably not going to pay people large amounts in advance (and certainly nowhere near 5500 BTC).