The 1.5 million dollar (5067 bitcoin) new bitcoin talk forum.

[Bobsurplus]

Pure bullshit. No way some 20 YO dude, who owes nothing to nobody here spent all that money on the forum.
What he did was funnel the money from his left pocket to his right.
Lets not be stupid here. 1.5M for a forum is absurd and extremely unlikely, dare I say, impossible. Unless of course you're a fool and got taken for that money by a con-man forum building company!

Anyway...

The new forum cost a few k, maybe 10-100k and even at that it better be gold plated and come with blowjobs like an earlier poster mentioned.

For real though, get real.. most of that money ended up in the pocket of one young rich dude who was in the right place at the right time.

While 1.5M seems like quite a bit, when you have a team of 10 people employed for 2 years (or however long it takes) + years of future support, it doesn't seem like very much. Theymos is a pretty bright guy, I have a hard time thinking Slickage tricked him. I fail to see how people who haven't seen the work done behind the scenes can even speculate as to the costs. I don't know if the forum software is going to be worth $1.5M, but how could anyone possibly speculate without seeing a finished product? Bust Theymos' balls and start burning things when and if we see an inferior end product. I will be happy to join you 

Something that people fail to realize, is that Theymos wouldn't have to funnel forum funds. With the exception of donator funds which were explicitly said to be going towards new forum software, Theymos could probably legally just take Bitcointalk's funds if he wanted them. Why sneak around and slowly steal forum funds when you could just do it all at once without any repercussions?

Regarding the UI discussion, UI work hasn't started yet. If you see any nasty looking screenshots of epochtalk, thats because its just placeholders at this point. There are UI guys who will be working with everyone to design aesthetically pleasing theme(s). The backend work is very complicated, vast improvements are being added, and some pivotal features that aren't available in any current forum software.

I dont think Im failing to realize anything bud. I mean, sure it could have cost 1.5M with 10 people full time for a year or two but im sure even I who has zero experience in building sites, or forums could have hired a team to build it and it would have cost a fraction of the price. I mean seriously.. I know people who have built websites before, ma of them and I never heard about any costing crazy amounts.

Anyway. I guess only time will tell, but Im betting on most of that money going into his pockets and not into the forum.

[SaltySpitoon]

I dont think Im failing to realize anything bud. I mean, sure it could have cost 1.5M with 10 people full time for a year or two but im sure even I who has zero experience in building sites, or forums could have hired a team to build it and it would have cost a fraction of the price. I mean seriously.. I know people who have built websites before, ma of them and I never heard about any costing crazy amounts.

Anyway. I guess only time will tell, but Im betting on most of that money going into his pockets and not into the forum.

Again, $1.5m may sound like a lot, but split amongst a team of people over years, it really isn't. Building epochtalk is really a colossal task. Its not like designing a website, its building a multifaceted and interactive software to compete and surpass other forum softwares in terms of usability. The reason Bitcointalk hasn't updated its SMF version in forever, is because so many custom add ons are already in place just to make this forum usable, updating and then fixing compatibility would take thousands of hours. SMF is so broken, without Theymos' custom patches, Bitcointalk wouldn't be able to handle nearly as many people as it has right now. Stop thinking about the cost to build something like SMF, Epochtalk will be on a different level.

The backend of Bitcointalk is pathetic. The moderator tools are patched together, the admin tools are patched together, user functionality is at a minimum, there isn't integrated PGP, there isn't integrated Bitcoin message signing, there aren't integrated market tools, you can't delete anything because SMF is single threaded, the entire system is archaic and slow, indexing is slow, banning users is hugely time consuming and complicated, usergroup permissions are messed up. And thats just what I could think of off the top of my head. It would probably cost $100k to have a team of people build everything we need on top of SMF, but again we would face the issue of what to do when its time to upgrade something. The goal is to have a new software that can easily be upgraded and expanded upon whenever we need.

As a member here, this forum seems fine enough. People are happy to complain about avatars or the trust system or whatever minor changes they would like, but the forums is in dire need of a complete overhaul. Is $1.5m too much, perhaps, but if we get $1.5m worth of forum then its money well spent.

[hilariousandco]

Something that people fail to realize, is that Theymos wouldn't have to funnel forum funds. With the exception of donator funds which were explicitly said to be going towards new forum software, Theymos could probably legally just take Bitcointalk's funds if he wanted them. Why sneak around and slowly steal forum funds when you could just do it all at once without any repercussions?

I tend to agree with this. theymos is probably already quite well off from being an early adopter anyway but if he wanted more money he could just start paying himself a bigger wage out of the forum funds and ad revenue (and theymos actually gets much less than many of the other mods from the monthly mod payments). People just like the most sexiest or controversial conspiracies as they're always more exciting for the outside accusers but often completely wrong or based on half-truths and circumstantial evidence at best.

[Wangbus]

The closed beta went down due to the server issues in the past weeks. Things are moving along though. Again, look at our repo's on the Githubs if you want to see our progress. Make some issues, etc etc.

[el kaka22]

I wonder that, is the new forum software installed or not? Today I found that there are few minutes of downtime (for me) but I then able to access.
BTW, 1.5 million dollars is no longer just 5067 bitcoin as stated in the subject. It is about 6485 bitcoins now! That is, we need ~130 VIP donors to get the new forum!

[Muhammed Zakir]

I wonder that, is the new forum software installed or not? Today I found that there are few minutes of downtime (for me) but I then able to access.

There is private beta going on but I don't think downtime(you got) was because of it. BTW, if you are getting 503 error, it is probably due to your fast browsing.

BTW, 1.5 million dollars is no longer just 5067 bitcoin as stated in the subject. It is about 6485 bitcoins now! That is, we need ~130 VIP donors to get the new forum!

Forum money also depend on ads. So your statement is wrong.