Incoming text wall.
And as paraipan suggests, a TL;DR:
- The first huge wall of text is me responding to the fact that he didn't think I have put any efforts into OpFab, and just me explaining the history of things and the hurdles I have had to go through. The reason for the textwall is someone doubting me and I need to show them a picture of the situation. A picture is worth 1000 words, well that's about a 2.5 picture reply. The doubting me is a valid statement though, but I have so many things going on that it takes like that big of a reply to get the message across.
- Re: customer deposts: I can't give you guys coins that I don't have, but I will likely be paying users out of pocket for this in a manner that is affordable. The way the site was set up before, apparently, advertisers were not allowed to withdrawal at all. I want to change things like this to allow that sort of functionality but I am not going to be able to do that especially if you guys try to all withdrawal at once, it's just not going to be feasible, and if giantdragon still had the site, apparently, he wouldn't have paid advertiser balances out anyway. Advertisers would use their balances for advertising, and the publishers had the ability to be paid out. If a publisher has a balance and the amount requested for withdrawal is reasonable, I'll just pay it out of pocket, but it's not like I have a massive bitcoin balance to be paying out of. I have a very little amount of bitcoin, and after buying coinurl the amount is laughable but if the total amount of publisher withdrawals is a few BTC a week or something then I can make that happen. Be reasonable, be patient, and this transition will be pretty seamless.
- CoinURL is running on my server at the moment and it might crumble my server when it goes live, so beware of service interruptions during this period.
- Basically read the last reply at the bottom in reply to the CoinURL stuff as it is the most relevant.
I'm pessimistic about this change.
What I really liked about CoinURL was giantdragon's commitment to improving it, especially when I gave him a feature request, which he had already implemented a few hours later.
On the other hand, Operation Fabulous, which is currently owned mc_lovin has barely changed after it was sold; there are no way to arrange sites by view count or other statistics, changing the e-mail address is still "temporarely[sic] suspended" and while the site is functional, it doesn't seem to have the same level of support Anonymous Ads and CoinURL have, which have continued to improve in many ways since their inception.
I totally understand where you are coming from, Matoking, and I'm glad you brought that point up.
Yeah, OpFab hasn't been visually updated since 2010. It looks like it was made in 1990.
If you looked at the advertisers account page, you would have noticed that it was spelled correctly. And on the publishers account page, it was spelled incorrectly. The reason it was spelled properly on one page and not the other is because before I even bought OpFab (with Edd), I told BioMike that there was the typo, and he corrected one of them but he must not have realized there were two of them. To show you that I'm serious about this stuff, I have corrected the spelling on both pages now, omg, first thing ever changed. Why haven't I done any more? Read on.
I don't want to mess things up!
Normally, when I get a site, or build a site, or anything, I like to have a full backup of everything, then if I make changes, I don't fear data loss. Sure, we have backups, but OpFab is not as easy to work on as a normal LAMP site. I prefer to work on a site in a development environment, offline system entirely, do the changes, and then push the changes live once I'm satisfied. Luckily we moved the OpFab server to a familiar OS, but it does
not use MySQL for a database. So I can't just make a quick dump and load the dump up in the dev box. It uses Firebird, and in my opinion Firebird is terrible. I still have no idea how to do much of anything in Firebird, but I finally, FINALLY got a copy of OpFab in a dev environment about a week or so ago (January 4th to be exact) and I have already started to make visual changes to it. I read somewhere that it is very easy to corrupt a Firebird database by making changes to the live site. The original OpFab author, BioMike, is still around but he is a busy person as well and he lives in the Netherlands so the time zones are completely out of wack and he only has, when he's not on holidays, a few hours to work on something during the week, and I work F/T during the day so it is very hard for us to find a time to work together. On the 4th I had to stay up until 7AM when working with him to learn how to operate it, and I have a log of our entire conversation, all of the sites' changes and exactly how to set up an OpFab server from scratch, to the point where I could literally make a bash script that creates an OpFab server with 1 command. If I have any further questions, I can consult that conversation we had, as I have asked like everything already. Firebird is very similar to MySQL but basically all the command names are different. It was also very hard for me to have a server to experiment with a server either, but at Christmas I traded a nice C2D gaming rig to my sister for a dual-771 Xeon box she got for free from work and I ordered dual quads for it and set it up at home with VMWare, and I'm having a blast with it, the very first thing I did was get in touch with BioMike and we worked together to set up a dev box, which is running successfully.
I have contracted several people to help me with OpFab's development. First I got in touch with kiba, as he has worked on some of the graph stuff before and was hopefully familiar with the site. Right off the bat, I gave him site files to work on, and he says OpFab is hopeless, the code is horrid, and we would be better off building a whole new OpFab from scratch. I disagree, I think it works very well, it just looks bad. I told him that wherever in the code you see a database set/get, to just leave that in place and worry about the styling and flow of the site... It didn't go over very well, he started building his OpFab v2 and got a couple pages into it and... yea, he's sort of mad at me for being so busy, which I am, if I had more time I wouldn't need to hire someone I could just sit here and learn all of these foreign technologies and do everything myself. I paid him in advance to do the interface, it's not going to happen, I really don't care though, since in the past few months I have really started to study how some of these programming languages work. I am familiar with PHP but I hadn't really built any heavy PHP-sites before (besides like including files and echoing) so it's going to take some time before I am a master at it. I have known HTML and CSS since sometime in 2004 and it's child's play to me, but PHP is on another level. I studied it for a long this week, I am making mastering PHP my new goal for the next couple weeks, I have learned a lot and every night my mind is BLOWN about how great this language is. kiba, primarily a Ruby on Rails developer, wants to build the whole site in Rails. I don't even know what Rails is and I kept telling him, like, let me look into what it is exactly before we go ahead with it. Seeing as how there was a Rails exploit last week where vircurex and some related stock exchange got hacked and it wasn't their fault, it was Rails'. I still don't know what Rails is for, but it doesn't sound all too great. OpFab's primary engine, though, is Python. The front end being PHP is not complicated in the least and I totally understand the code, but the back-end? Har har. I look at it and I know I have a LOT to learn, but I watched a few videos on Python and I really like it, now all I need to do is learn how to build something in it so I can start tinkering with that code!
There was someone else as well I contracted to build a new OpFab. He built me a custom database for an unrelated project and I was just blown away at the professionalism and speed of this other alternative database software, redis. I did some research on redis and I absolutely love it. The site's tutorials make it very, very easy to figure out, whereas with Firebird it's like I need to sit there and read a book, basically. I can't even Google questions I have about Firebird, hardly anyone uses it anymore, it's very unpopular. I have to basically read the docs which are insane. It might take me awhile to read it and undertand it but I want to learn Firebird in and out just so that I can say to myself that I have tackled another system on my quest for knowledge. When I work with things, and there is a handy command, I always include it in this offline wikipedia I have for myself, I make my little cheat-sheets and it does not take long for me to memorize everything, either. I have already found one
cheat sheet for Firebird, but I look at it and I don't understand any of that. How do I... back up a database? That's not on the cheat sheet. I know, now, how to do that, though. Anyways, I really liked this redis project we worked on, and I actually have a supplementary redis database on BitcoinTrading.com right now for Bitcoin price statistics. I basically gave him a list of like 10 really awesome ideas I had and he's like, where do we start? I was like, well, let's rebuild OpFab, if you are that good, let's see what you can do. He said he didn't need to see any site files whatsoever, he could rebuild the whole thing from scratch just by looking at the functions. Well I spent like 5 or 6 hours working with him on that one, and the project basically stalled out when he became extremely busy at work. So somewhere there is kiba's partially built OpFab2 and another one this guy had. There still is a chance we get it completed but I am not concerned or worried about it. No loss, though, as OpFab1 is just chuggin' along still. I do lose out when I pay for developers out of pocket and nothing comes of it. I am only part owner of OpFab, Edd is the other owner. Edddddd... seriously.. does.. nothing.. *smack*. Nice guy, he handles all of our money. I don't think OpFab is very profitable so I am not really worried, I think the site has made a profit of a whole 15 BTC so far in 1 year! I haven't gotten any sort of dividend payment out of it for being part owner, the site has cost me more than anything. But I've come to terms with it not making any money. At this point it just more fun to operate a site like this than worry about money. Even OpFab1, with it's simple-seeming interface, is very intense to maintain. I have to manually log in every day and check if there are any outstanding sites to approve. And if I don't check it for a couple days, a site could have signed up and left the 'unapproved' banner up on their page, which looks very unprofessional(!!!) and have taken it down by the time I have checked to see if such a banner does exist on their page. Then when I don't see a banner there, I have to one-at-a-time email the users and inquire if they have taken the banner down or if they just haven't put it back up yet. This process consumes part of my evening as it is. I have some radical ideas on how to streamline things. Every time a publisher creates an ad box and it goes into the queue of 'unapproved' sites, there should be a little code snippet at the bottom of that script that fires me off an email? That seems pretty easy to do? And the button to approve the site, whatever I click on for 'approving' it, that code, put it in the email. Since the site tracks how many pageviews a page is getting, why don't we auto-approve sites that are clearly getting views? Then when I give it my stamp of approval, it's status changes from auto-approved to just approved. Believe me, I have a list of things that we need to work on. I write massive 10-page emails like this to BioMike and Edd and everyone thinks the ideas are great but the implementation is up to me, and this whole time I haven't had an environment to experiment with.
This all said, I am glad that OpFab is as powerful as it is behind the scenes, and a new OpFab entirely is not going to be necessary.
The interface of a site is the easiest thing to do. Have you seen my site,
Murder Capitals? (formerly Bitcoin Mafia due to this SSL company not giving me an SSL cert for BitcoinTrading because it sounded too 'commerical' and apparently it's a good idea for the site to be secure.) The whole interface I did by hand. And I mean, it was there before, I just changed every little image and all the colors, the styling, the whole theme, I changed pretty much every pixel of it, that should be testament to my CSS styling skills, as well I integrated some functionality in there that wasn't there previously. It took me like hundreds of hours, and I think it's awesome. It's like 95% complete. It was this site I was working on immediately before I got a job, I was unemployed for a bit there thinking I could just live off Bitcoins, and then I got a wicked job in IT and it was 100% attributed to Bitcoin. Bitcoin seriously got me a job, and in that job I work with Linux and websites and everything, so all day when I'm at work I'm expanding my knowledge-base even more, the learning process never stops, except I have to work on their projects instead of mine... Since I work full-time now, it's very hard to find the time to work on things like this, but I still have a few hours in an evening and rest assured, my Bitcoin sites get all of it. I don't "go out with friends" or ignore you guys, I seriously am just really busy! My #1 problem is that I have too many things going on at once. This is why I hire developers. Y'know, if you get 2-3 replies out of me in a week, that's pretty good. I hired the owner of Bitcoin Pyramid, Arsen, as well, to integrate Bitcoin into the Bitcoin Mafia game and a year after that went on, not a single line of code was changed, and we just sort of parted ways, no hard feelings, just nothing got done. He was very busy, as I am now too. I also have a signmaking company that I have customers hollering at me to cut their logos too and I have a nice bitcoin mining farm that spans 1 room in 2 houses and when the whole farm is down, I have to go drive down there and fix things... Luckily I am the BAMT-master now, and I have uptimes of like 30 days before a rig even goes down, so it's not an issue anymore but it was at one time. The good thing about not having time for my sites and a job instead, is that I have money to invest into my sites! I can like, buy sites like CoinURL!
I was so extremely pleased to see the code for CoinURL. I understand every detail of it entirely, and I have built a few Twitter Bootstrap sites like this in the past but I always make static sites, having the code to review I am learning a lot already of how it is put together. The code actually resembles many of the other sites I have built, it looks like I made this site except a year in the future. You can rest assured I will be modifying and adding functionality to CoinURL far easier than with OpFab.
I hope this backstory helps you understand where I'm coming from. I have been living in a computer world since 4 years old, I had to learn how to navigate MS-DOS before I could even write. I spent my entire evening working with computers for over 20 years now. Programming is just one thing I really wished I learned before, but every day I am just soaking it up.
On the other hand, Operation Fabulous, which is currently owned mc_lovin has barely changed after it was sold; there are no way to arrange sites by view count or other statistics, changing the e-mail address is still "temporarely[sic] suspended" and while the site is functional, it doesn't seem to have the same level of support Anonymous Ads and CoinURL have, which have continued to improve in many ways since their inception.
If mc_lovin will ask me, I can continue making improvements for some BTCs.
Yes! That would be epic! That's probably the best solution!
I have just sold CoinURL to the new owner. Stay tuned!
What happens with the balance I had on CoinURL?
That's a good question. I'm still scratching my head on how this is going to go down. I'll keep you posted but rest assured all the funds are stored offline and I have to build a fresh wallet for the new CoinURL, it's not like they are stored in some remote site. I wish the coins came along with CoinURL, but if he did include the coins, a person could have just bought the site, stolen all the coins, and toss the site away. Originally he was just selling the domain names and I made an offer to buy and revive the whole site. The fact that there is even going to be a tomorrow for CoinURL is 100% my reviving it. Re: balances, well, I had coins on there too, guys. If the amount is very small or negligible, I will just pay you all out of pocket. If there is a million dollars outstanding, well sorry folks but I haven't won the lottery yet. I was talking to giantdragon though, and he says advertisers were originally not allowed to withdrawl at all. Once you put your coins in, they HAD to be spent to a publisher. I see some logic in this. And he says the no-warranties ToS covered this. Now me refunding advertisers which is against the sites' original ToS and site operation is just simply me, mc_lovin, being the nicest guy ever and I do stuff like that. Pay by the bite. Hug everyone. No shoes, no shirt, but service. Besides, the price I paid is far less than what it would take if I were to hire someone off the street to build the site entirely from scratch. I basically bought the domains, codebase, databases, and some minor support to get things rolling. It would have been worth it for me to purchase it simply to look over the beautiful code for the sake of learning. If I was 100% owner of OpFab, I would probably just integrate the two sites into one, but I'm still on the fence about that idea. I'd rather buy Edd's half and own them all but he won't sell
. But I'm mc_lovin and I am going to get the site back up and you guys won't even notice it down. It's actually running as we speak, I have dedicated this entire day and tomorrow to setting it all up and configuring, I would share the link right now but there's no point since the actual DNS hasn't been pointed at the server, but the site is up and running on my server, we can point coinurl.com and cur.lv at the server and it will just start working instantly. Folks, my server is going to friggin' EXPLODE when this goes live. I really don't have the resources right now to get this running on there, but we're going to try it out, see what the bottlenecks are, and soup up the server to meet the demand. I have already contacted BitVPS and asked them to double the memory in the server and they said yes, absolutely, I am just sitting here impatiently as they do that. At that point, if it's still not enough, I am paying someone for resources on a really powerful dedicated server, I am trying to set it up so that if the BitcoinTrading or OpFab server does down, it automatically falls over to the superserver. Or maybe vice-versa, it runs on the superserver and falls over to the VPS's. Actually at work we have a full rack in a big datacenter, and I have asked a dozen times if I could put a physical box there, I would buy a SuperMicro server with redundant hard drives, redundant power supplies, hell I'll put a high-availability VMware cluster there if possible, I'd pay for electricity and per-MB bandwidth if necessary. He's considering it, it's still on the table as an idea but he doesn't seem too enthusiastic about the idea. I wish I could just go to the DC-owner and get a server put in an unrelated rack, even, but this stuff all takes time and I have enough on my plate to worry about keeping the BitVPS servers up and harassing them whenever things go down. Hell, even if my boss gave me a VPS on their VMWare server that would be epic and I would upgrade the server so it would only be faster than before, but now that this CoinURL is going to be on there and if it's half as intense as giantdragon has implied it to be, good luck with that one. But I'll keep trying.
So when the site is running, and everyone requests withdrawls at once... Be realistic. Site is starting up with no funds and we have to work together on this one. If you have a balance, use it for advertising like you had originally intended. Publishers, I think I can handle the amounts that you are likely to be receiving. I know with CoinURL I had the banners up for the whole 6 months, I got like a half million pageviews and I only netted like 0.20 BTC. So if everyone was as heavy as a publisher as I am and that is the kind of money you were getting, I can pay you that out of pocket. But one day a time, one person a time, WHEN I have time. In the meantime, I'll pay giantdragon for his time, and we'll take it from there.
Make sense?
