Это что-то вроде "У нас традиция - каждый год мы с мужиками вспоминаем про epochtalk".
Судя по всему, этой традиции наступил конец:
theymos выпустил
объявление о том, что развитие Epochtalk больше не поддерживается со стороны форума, несмотря на все затраченные на это средства (
5,9 миллионов долларов за 11 лет) и усилия, потому что полученный результат абсолютно неудовлетворителен, а то, что планировалось сделать за год, остаётся сырым и непригодным для использования и спустя много лет. В итоге, многие из тех функций, которые запрашивались, реализованы на текущем скрипте в виде дополнений, и принято решение и дальше допиливать текущий скрипт, а не распыляться на то, что вряд ли когда-либо сможет полноценно заработать. Так что можно наконец-таки попрощаться с идеей Epochtalk!
P.S. Скрипт Epochtalk делался под открытой лицензией, так что любой желающий может продолжить его и довести до ума, если возникнет подобное желание.
A very long time ago now, we hired a company to start developing Epochtalk, which was intended to completely replace the software which currently runs the forum. It was originally supposed to be done in one year; that target was totally missed, but it
did eventually get to a usable state which was ~90% feature-complete. However, starting around 2020, development really seemed to stall. I could see that good progress was continually being made, so I didn't want to cancel it, but it never really seemed to get any closer to being ready for bitcointalk.org to actually
use it, since it was still missing features, it wasn't stable/bug-free enough, and there was no solid plan to smoothly make the transition.
Recently, a
live-data demo of Epochtalk was released. I had been pushing for something like this to be released ASAP in order to have a solid milestone to aim for, and also so that Epochtalk could be tested in a real-world context. The demo works, and in some ways it is actually useful, but I found it underwhelming, and subsequently the community found a really inexcusable number of bugs in it. After seeing the low quality of the demo, in combination with the many years of disappointing progress overall, my opinion on the Epochtalk project shifted from "this is going too slowly, but it might still bear good fruit eventually" to "this is probably going nowhere". Therefore, I've decided that the forum will no longer pursue Epochtalk. It's frustrating to pull the plug on this after investing a lot of time and money into it, but I've come to believe that continuing would be "throwing good money after bad" at this point.
For forum users, nothing has changed. The developers of Epochtalk were not working on anything
actually used by forum users: they were working on a hope that we might someday move away from PHP/SMF. Most of the original goals for Epochtalk have in fact already been completed
in the current software through work by myself, PowerGlove, and others in the 10+ years since the idea of new forum software was first contemplated. Since 2011, we've added trust, merit, 2FA, "evil fees", watchlists, drafts, a sane reports system, and many other improvements on stock SMF. Going forward, we will
continue to make improvements to the current software. One of the most requested features is improving the forum's usability on mobile devices, and that is already being worked on.
Epochtalk has always been open source under the MIT license, so you can still go run it right now if you want; the code is in the repos in
this Github organization. The developers have indicated to me that they intend to independently continue its development, without our support. The
Epochtalk proxy of bitcointalk.org will also stay up for at least a while.
