So after looking into it, it'll take a while before we get a changelog up but for now you can take a look at our commit history on Github to see what changes are being made in real time.

https://github.com/epochtalk/epochtalk/commits/master

Sorry for the lack of posting. We're trying to get the last of the bugs handled at this point. Beta is being updated as new features are pushed out and bugs are being crushed. The idea of a changelog is probably necessary at this point. I'll see if I can get one started.

So that's what I was originally thinking of but because of the nature of BBCode, you can write a quote without specifying an author, message, or timestamp. And although I could write something that'll checks and ensures that a quote has some link back to the original quote, that's not how it was built to work (my estimate, not a known fact). Adding that additional check may also break our importing tool since all the quotes in SMF does not support this feature right now.

And that's the fun part about working with legacy data and systems.

I think the best way to think about this problem is to break it down to the fundamentals, it's first principles. The core problem is one user is trying to impersonate another user. The issue with quoting is more a symptom of the disease rather than the root cause. So finding a way for users to be unique looking throughout the system would cure the disease but also ensure that the same thing won't happen through another form like forum posts or such.

Again, any help is appreciated but till then I'll keep thinking about this.

I'm glad you finally agree!

But you can watch the code being written here: https://github.com/epochtalk/epochtalk

Also, you really should lookup who these "Anons" are. They actually have a pretty long list of accomplishments. Warren in particular.

Because that's not what I was paid for. If you'd like to front the money, I could build those things too. Although I'll admit right here that those things you ask for are not my specialty so they may not be built to the highest standards. Web Applications though, is what I've spent my entire career on. So while you ask why I don't write those things, you might as well ask an Electrician why he didn't build his own electrical grid for your house to be on while he was wiring up your house. Do you understand the gravity of your question now?

Trolling aside, if you're more concerned about the why. Then I'll leave you with this. When this forum is done, it will be bitcoin that built this forum. That's point 1. Point 2 and probably more of interest to theymos, the forum software that is already out there did not meet the requirements that theymos wanted. The key reason being that he wanted more control over what could be done to the internals of the forum. This approach allows him to build specific tools that are not found in other forums tailored to the needs of this community. Some of these tools are more comprehensive moderation tools, more expansive reporting tools, and more precise banning tools to deal with spammers and scammers.

To be fair, he did have a number of these tools that he wrote himself. We've just rolled them into the new forum so they act and feel as if they are a part of the software and not just an after thought or mod.

You also missed one more thing. The fact that we're building this from the ground up means that the community can have an active hand in the building of this project. I've already listened to those that are helpful and integrated some of their ideas into the forum. Things that the current version of this forum does not support (spoiler tags for one, highlighting admin/mods for another).

With that said, it's all been paid for already. Why not help make the forum better than all the rest by giving it a try when the next beta comes back up and giving some constructive feedback?

Also, the reason why there are so many "other" forum software is because there is more than one way to use a forum, and often times more than one use case that determines how that particular software is going to be built. This is a use case for the bitcoin community. To go back to the house analogy, it's like having a say in the blueprint as you are building your house. Do you want higher ceilings? A marble staircase? French doors? You can make those suggestions and if they are within reason, we can just build it.

I hear you. I would like a more proactive system too. But I think the biggest hurdle is the BBCode system in general. After thinking about this more, there's nothing to stop a user from making up their own quote and putting anyone's name on it by just using the quote tag. Although it's possible to modify the parser in the new forum to reject quotes that aren't attached to existing posts, this might break all the older quotes being imported when we switch over. I'll think about this more though. This is a valid concern.

I think your issues stem from the fact that you don't quite understand how software is made. I can understand that to you nearly 2 years, and a 1+MM dollar amount seems absurd. No, really I do. But have you taken a look at how much it cost to build some of the other forum software out there?

All I'm asking is, before you go and make a forum post, consider if what you're about to post, is a gut reaction to some numbers or an informed rant. I encourage you to go and search for how much is costs to build software. This might shift your perspective a bit.

Being that you're still a student, I'll give you the benefit of doubt. Most software projects, especially of this scale, can easily go over 1MM. And to take a project to completion (although really there's never an end to any real software project), usually go over a year. Were we a bit naive with the initial estimate? Yes, we had the same thought you have. "It's just a forum, it can't be too hard, and it definitely shouldn't take a few seasoned devs more than a year to make."

Boy were we wrong. And I'll be the first to admit that. But rather than just call it quits and move on. We decided to stick with the project and see that it gets done. Here's a quick list of things you need to consider while making a forum and problems we've run into. Not all of this information can be found online and so we had to experiment until we found a good solution. Hopefully you can use this list to see what it's like to build a larger scale software project.

• What Programming Language do you use? This is going to be an open source project so you want to choose a language that's widely used and avoid esoteric languages like Haskell.
• What DB do you use? PostGRES? MySQL? Oracle? SQL Server? NoSQL? Remember to balance costs vs. performance vs. ACID compatibility. Atomicity and Transactions are key here. There are very nasty bugs to be found if you don't do your homework.
• What should the interface look like? Should it look exactly the same? Should you improve upon the old interface?
• Write your own BBCode Parser? Alternatively, how do you handle other parsers at the same time?
• Plugins. Make sure you balance extensibility with security. Also, how do you handle extensibility while making custom plugins a breeze
• Security! Are you making sure you're follow the latest OWASP?
• SPA vs static page rendering? Balance client performance vs server performance
• How do you handle large DB table sizes (over 10 millions rows)? How do you handle querying that data? Which indexes do you build
• To add on to the point above, what is a reasonable fetch time? Sub millisecond? 10 milliseconds? 100 milliseconds?
• Banning users. IP level bans? Username Bans? Temporary bans? Then do iterations of all those combined
• Notifications. You need to let the user know if they have a PM or else that page is just a wasteland. But what about other interesting items? Like letting the user know when a thread they posted in has more posts? Or if they were mentioned in another thread they haven't viewed yet.
• Additional Requirements. Theymos doesn't want a clone of SMF, if he did, he wouldn't have asked us to build new software. So how do you use your codebase to solve some of this problems? Better Mod Reports, highlighting admins and mods, etc. Do you take requests of the user base as well, things like spoiler tags and nearly every other suggestion in this board (They have insight on what works and what doesn't for them.)

By no means is this list exhaustive. There are many more topics to cover but I think this gives you the basis to form an idea of what it takes to build forum software. It's not as easy as a collection of posts under a collection of threads under a collection of boards. There are users, messages, custom pages, reports, moderation, administration, and many more things that need to be built along the way.


Also, being that you're a CS student, you should really take a look at Github. That's pretty much where all the open source code you'll be using the in future is going to be held. Oh and EpochTalk is on there too. You can keep track of all the work we do on a daily basis. https://github.com/epochtalk/epochtalk

Except, our code is open source and hosted on Github. You can track the progress of the software in real time, as we're writing it. And no, we're not doing this for free.

link: http://github.com/epochtalk/epochtalk

I really like this idea. Let us rift on it for a little bit and figure out a good way to show this in the UI. I know reddit does this by highlighting the OP username in blue. So we may do something similar. Currently we're highlighting users with distinct roles distinct colors, so we may not do the exact same thing but highlighting their post might just work.

Yea the "HERO" member stuff is just a placeholder for now. We should be moving into the trust/activity work some time this week so that'll be functional soon.

Also Beta was down because we were in the middle of updating the beta DB with the latest from this forum. We're trying to keep up to date and making sure our importer can handle staged imports (so we don't have to rebuild the DB each and every time). We found a bug so we had to shut the site down for a bit while we addressed that bug.

Hmm I missed the part that this was in reference to PMs.

So in that case, we could actually build a modification where an "imposter" role could be created and people like 0gNasty could be thrown into those roles. When a user is given this role, any interact with that use would come with a big warning label that says something to the affect of "This user is a known imposter. Do not give him your BTC."

This label would show up on his posts, his PM, his profile page, etc. That would be even easier to do and is far more destructive to the imposter and would take less work than trying to figure out if he maliciously edited a quote.

What do you guys think of that idea instead?

So I guess I should have explained it a bit better. We're thinking about loading the referenced quote right into the same place as the quote. So the user can tell if the "quoter" changed something when he quoted. Again we're playing around with idea so not sure how it's going to look or work just yet.

So just a quick mockup in my head would be, the user would see that a post has a quote. But in bright colors be alerted that the quote doesn't match the original in some way and given a button to load the original quote. The user can click the button and the quote is removed and replaced with the original full text. (We could even make that section resizeable so it doesn't take up the entire screen) That's sort of the idea I had in mind. My biggest concern is to avoid inspecting the quote text for differences since that CPU power could be used for other things. Character count is the first thing that pops into my head but isn't the most accurate signal of modified text. We'll figure something out though.

Also, this is good feedback so don't be afraid to point out something you don't like.

You can always view our latest code at https://github.com/epochtalk/epochtalk.

We work on this daily and you can track our progress. And if you really want, you can run this yourself on your own computer. All you need is node, postgres, and redis.


Also, to those that say that they can write a forum in a few months. We could probably do a basic forum in a few days. The part that takes the longest is all the feature requests on top of a basic forum that the moderators need to deal with the massive amount of reports, trolls, scammers, etc.

We are building custom tools on top of a not too basic forum and these tools are being built with the help and input of the moderators and admins here. We're also building in many features that you wouldn't find in many open source forums at the request of people in this board. Although some of our features are found in some of the more recent forums (Discourse, nodeBB, etc).

So while yes, someone capable could build a forum in a few months. We're not here to bang out a job and call it a day. We're here to build something that will last and can deal with the problems the moderators face on a daily basis.

Lastly I'll leave with this: software follows the 80/20 rule, 80% of the work/time/effort is usually concentrated in that last 20%, or the last mile.

There is a quoting feature on the top right of each post. But we're trying out something soon so that when you click on a quote, it'll take you to the original post. We find that being able to show the original with as little friction as possible is the easier solution compared with quoting without modifications.

The downside is that this might take a bit of time before it goes into the beta build... 

Two reason we're not making the forum public without login, and this is one of them. The other is to discourage use of the beta until we're ready for you guys.



Google does and quite well actually. We're actually hoping that they can also crawl JS built pages as well since this is a single page app.

We've already duplicated the feature shorena mentioned in the new forum software. Also, we highlight the first unread post for you so you know where you start reading from. 

So as it stands, signatures will not have images because the signature space will be fixed height. And most images probably won't fit in that height.

What your asking for is called "text-shadow" and CSS does support it. I'm not sure if the shadow tag on this forum is broken but it works in epochtalk.