Current status:
Slots BTC/Slot Person
1 3 lleibowitz
3 2.75 InspiredEye
3 2.5 Inaba


No.

You may have seen images (which aren't allowed anymore for new signatures), but certainly not an iframe.

I'm a native English speaker and I know some French. I took two years of German in middle school (it was required), but I didn't do very well in the course and I've forgotten pretty much all of it.

I'd like to learn Japanese some day.

People would start complaining about everything he does, just like they do with Gavin, etc.

It's not recommended. SatoshiDice does it, but notice that they have this warning:


If you do "auto-refunds" without a similar warning, people will lose money and be very angry.

Ha! I figured out what causes most of these problems. (Though I guess   has been the special non-breaking space character in all browsers for at least several years.)


With PHP < 5.4.0, 0xA0 was passed through normally. Now, this character is considered invalid UTF-8 and the entire input to htmlspecialchars is scrapped.

This needs to be fixed in SMF. It affects even 2.x. I fixed it for the PM emails, but it'd be too much work to fix it everywhere.

I'm getting pretty sick of dealing with SMF's escaping insanity... Who thought it was a good idea to have every function take strings with different degrees of escaping?

French: liberté

Guess what it means.

This topic brings back memories...


Heh.

Vous pouvez aller à les sections françaises maintenant. Ces règles sont pour les anglophones seulement.

Done, thanks.

Done.

This causes problems because SMF converts multiple spaces into a series of &nbsp; entities. So "  " becomes "&nbsp; ". When the entities are converted to 0xA0, it causes at least these problems:
- When quoting a PM which has multiple spaces, you will end up submitting a message containing 0xA0 characters. This confuses the forum's mail processing and the recipient ends up being sent a PM notification email with an empty message. If you receive a lot of PMs you've probably noticed this.
- There is no way for the forum to correctly display a clearsigned document if it has multiple spaces, even with [code] tags. Copying it will copy the non-breaking spaces (though only on some systems, I think) and it won't sign/verify consistently.
- I can't use the forum's file browser because submitting a file with any 0xA0s messes things up for some reason.

I looked at the XHTML/HTML standards, and &nbsp; actually is defined as being 0xA0. But I'm pretty sure that my browser didn't used to behave this way...

Look at this page:
https://bitcointalk.org/test.php

The form is pre-filled with a &nbsp;. If I submit it, I get "a0", indicating that the browser sent the special 0xA0 "non-breaking space" character instead of a regular space. This isn't normal, and it's causing several problems for the forum software. This behavior started when I upgraded php and switched to nginx before switching servers, and it's persisted after switching servers. So it's probably some problem with the configuration of nginx or php.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

The code for test.php:

Software developers are apparently terrible at marketing themselves. In the past 6 months I've gotten only 2-3 inquiries about the project. It's true that I'm not very good at managing this process (due to lack of time and also lack of experience with this kind of thing), but you'd think that someone would be able to find some way of getting me to hire them when there's 5000+ BTC on the line. I don't really have time to search out people for this job, and I won't convert large amounts of the forum's BTC into fiat for hiring people in more traditional ways.

My current plan is to create the core of the software (database, core API, security) myself and set bounties on sections of the rest (UI, full API, etc.). I've made some progress, but I don't have much time and my current priority is fixing some problems with SMF. Maybe I could hire someone to write this stuff under my close direction.

I've thought a lot about just using some existing forum software, especially SMF. I've become far more familiar with SMF than I ever wanted to be; it wouldn't be very difficult for me to add all of my desired features to SMF at this point. But then I think about SMF's horrible escaping mess which is guaranteed to cause security problems in the future...

All of the other forum software packages I've investigated have major problems which are IMO probably worse than just creating software from scratch, especially when we easily have the money.

I figure that more money is better than less. It's not like I beg for donations or anything.

Here are all of the forum's expenses so far:

Use Klepatra. Copy your text, right click the Kleopatra icon, and choose "encrypt". The encrypted stuff will be on your clipboard.

Kleopatra sucks, though, so I often use the command-line. From the command-line, run something like gpg --encrypt --armor -r "theymos". Then enter your message and type Ctrl-Z when you're done.

Fixed.

In order to collect more money for the creation of good forum software, 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 0.5.
- 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.