Where's the new forum Theymos?

[Matthew N. Wright]

12 months ago I donated 10 BTC to you to make a new forum. You have since then collected over 6000 BTC and continue to collect on a regular basis, under the guise of "creating a new forum", yet you have yet to create a new forum.

Please present a status report of your progress in the past 12 months with creating the forum. Thanks.

[gweedo]

It would be best to raise enough money to finish the project before starting do you not think? 

Unless he is waiting to buy google, $602,400 is more than enough for software. If he wanted to he could hire me at a salary and I will work 9am-5pm on developing this forum software.

[r3wt]

It would be best to raise enough money to finish the project before starting do you not think?  

6000 btc isn't enough? no implied racism, but you could probably pay a group of coders in China or  India (where wages are low) to build a forum software for much less than that. But you knew that already GOAT. The ironic thing is, the more i hang around here on bitcointalk the more i realize the hypocrisy of an adminstrative group that scams donators and promises a new forum in return, but just like BFL, its biggest supporter, never delivers. In my opinion this is no more different than a common scammer promising asic shares and never delivering on that promise

[SRoulette]

6000 * $100 = $600'000.

Yes if 0.6 million dollars is not enough to get the forum updated I dont think it will ever get updated.

[r3wt]

It would be best to raise enough money to finish the project before starting do you not think? 

Unless he is waiting to buy google, $602,400 is more than enough for software. If he wanted to he could hire me at a salary and I will work 9am-5pm on developing this forum software.

Yeah i was kidding.

Did i use the wrong happy face?

  Is this the one I should have used?

hey there's another much needed forum update, a sarcasm tag and/or emoticon

[greyhawk]

Was the new forum supposed to be an improved bitcointalk or a completely separate forum to the current one?  Is there an old thread discussing this?

There was a sticky once, but it seems to have disappeard.

To paraphrase the idea was to bootstrap a new forums software from scratch supporting a plethora of options no other forums software supports as of yet out of the box and getting it right on the first try. "Version 1 is the best version of any software."

It was pretty lulzy.

EDIT: Found it https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50617.0

[greyhawk]

I'm pretty sure it was Theymos over reacting to having the forum hacked in 2011.

Pretty much this. It was a thought exercise on what would be the absolute perfect forum anyone could wish for. It didn't help that the amount on offer for development at the time was something like 3000 bucks, which is really just "Maybe I'll have a quick look at your specs and tell you what's outright impossible" kind of money.

[Luckybit]

12 months ago I donated 10 BTC to you to make a new forum. You have since then collected over 6000 BTC and continue to collect on a regular basis, under the guise of "creating a new forum", yet you have yet to create a new forum.

Please present a status report of your progress in the past 12 months with creating the forum. Thanks.

In my opinion they should plan it out thoroughly and turn this forum into a sustainable business model. They can monetize this forum around micropayments and not have to worry about donations ever again if they take their time. There is no rush either because Bitcoins are only worth $100.

My opinion is Bitcointalk should integrate tipping functionality, it should integrate cryptocurrencies into the forum in such a way that clicking certain links initiates a microtransaction or costs a fee. Honestly they will have to take the code base of Bitcointalk and completely integrate cryptocurrencies into it so micropayments, trading, smart contracts and other functionalities can be built into the forum itself.

Then all they'll have to do is charge transaction fees, fees for access to certain threads, but also they can have lotteries for posting in certain threads, reward posters who have good karma with bonus coins, etc.

So much can be done here that I think they should take their time and work on it a good six months. I think 6000 coins is only 600,000, and in my opinion they should have 2 professional programmers working on it and hoard the rest. They already implemented a web of trust system which I think is cool, it's only a matter of time before micropayments but it cannot happen right now because Bitcoin itself isn't prepared for micropayments with the Max Block Size so it would have to be done where you can use any of the major coins to pay.

[sonicby]

LOL
Why can not directly pay the organization SMF  ?
So fun.

[ShroomsKit]

600k for a forum?
Huh?
Good forum software costs 500 dollars at most.
It will need some modification. Plenty of mods are free, other will be made custom. Few 1000 at most.
Maybe some design work. 1 to 2k.
This can be done within 2 weeks easily.

So what will the other 595k be used for.
And who in its right mind donates all those coins for running a forum! Really, a forum??

[infested999]

600k for a forum?
Huh?
Good forum software costs 500 dollars at most.
It will need some modification. Plenty of mods are free, other will be made custom. Few 1000 at most.
Maybe some design work. 1 to 2k.
This can be done within 2 weeks easily.

So what will the other 595k be used for.
And who in its right mind donates all those coins for running a forum! Really, a forum??

Most of the 6,000 were probably donated when 1 BTC < $1

[ShroomsKit]

I understand at least a good bunch of those coins were donated when they were worth less but my guess is people are still donating.
I have nothing against the people who run this place. If you want to make sure they can buy a nice car then keep donating.
If you're doing it for a forum upgrade then don't send them a Satoshi anymore!
They have enough money to run the best forum possible for the next 40 years.

[ShroomsKit]

I understand at least a good bunch of those coins were donated when they were worth less but my guess is people are still donating.
I have nothing against the people sho run this place. If you want to make sure they can buy a nice car then keep donating.
If you're doing it for a forum upgrade then don't send them a Satoshi anymore!
They have enough money to run the best forum possible for the next 40 years.

Matthew seems to be the only one who wants new software and he is leaving in protest anyway.

Looks legit.

[infested999]

I understand at least a good bunch of those coins were donated when they were worth less but my guess is people are still donating.
I have nothing against the people sho run this place. If you want to make sure they can buy a nice car then keep donating.
If you're doing it for a forum upgrade then don't send them a Satoshi anymore!
They have enough money to run the best forum possible for the next 40 years.

Matthew seems to be the only one who wants new software and he is leaving in protest anyway.

To be fair I would rather everyone gets their donations back rather than a new software.

You could ask donators to prove they own the address they donated from and get their bitcoins back.

But you have to have kept logs of all donations and from whom. Wait, the blockchain does that automatically for you!

[theymos]

- More money is better than less money. I'm not going to turn down donations when people want to donate. (Though when asked, I often recommend that people not donate.) I'm not going to stop selling ads even though the forum probably has "enough" money. It's not bad for the forum to have extra money. It will be used on something useful at some point. If you don't like this, don't donate.
- More than half of the forum's money is from ads, not donations.
- During the school year, I am a full time student. I barely have time to administrate the forum.
- When I do have time, there are many interesting/important/fun things that compete for my attention. I don't spend all day working on the forum. I've certainly not been working full-time for 12 months on vaporware forum software...

I am still very interested in creating new forum software, and we probably now have enough money to do it. SMF works alright (definitely not perfectly), but there are two main problems with it that require more than just some modifications. Firstly, the coding style is generally insecure. It's very easy to introduce new security flaws, and it's likely that SMF has unknown security flaws. Secondly, modifications to SMF are somewhat difficult, and some types of modifications are so difficult that they will almost certainly never be done here. (Other forum software isn't significantly better, from what I've seen.)

There is unfortunately no magical machine which takes money and creates excellent software or hires a team of competent people. I'm not quite sure how best to turn the money into a good software product. I originally intended to give someone a bunch of money and have them handle the whole thing. I talked with dozens of people interested in doing this, but none of them made me totally confident. A while ago I decided that I will probably never be confident in any one person/company handling the entire project because I've thought about it much longer than they have (2 years), and I have many details about how it should work in my mind. So I probably need to get closer to the development process. My current plan is to write some detailed up-to-date specifications and do some of the high-level architectural work (DB tables, primarily) and then lead a team to do the rest.

I have a little more time now, but the forum software project is a somewhat low priority. I have several high-priority things to fix with the current software. If you want to help, I could use a very security-conscious PHP programmer to help me maintain/improve the current SMF installation.

[solex]

Frankly, this forum software seems perfectly fine for the job it is doing right now  

[dillpicklechips]

- More money is better than less money. I'm not going to turn down donations when people want to donate. (Though when asked, I often recommend that people not donate.) I'm not going to stop selling ads even though the forum probably has "enough" money. It's not bad for the forum to have extra money. It will be used on something useful at some point. If you don't like this, don't donate.
- More than half of the forum's money is from ads, not donations.
- During the school year, I am a full time student. I barely have time to administrate the forum.
- When I do have time, there are many interesting/important/fun things that compete for my attention. I don't spend all day working on the forum. I've certainly not been working full-time for 12 months on vaporware forum software...

I am still very interested in creating new forum software, and we probably now have enough money to do it. SMF works alright (definitely not perfectly), but there are two main problems with it that require more than just some modifications. Firstly, the coding style is generally insecure. It's very easy to introduce new security flaws, and it's likely that SMF has unknown security flaws. Secondly, modifications to SMF are somewhat difficult, and some types of modifications are so difficult that they will almost certainly never be done here. (Other forum software isn't significantly better, from what I've seen.)

There is unfortunately no magical machine which takes money and creates excellent software or hires a team of competent people. I'm not quite sure how best to turn the money into a good software product. I originally intended to give someone a bunch of money and have them handle the whole thing. I talked with dozens of people interested in doing this, but none of them made me totally confident. A while ago I decided that I will probably never be confident in any one person/company handling the entire project because I've thought about it much longer than they have (2 years), and I have many details about how it should work in my mind. So I probably need to get closer to the development process. My current plan is to write some detailed up-to-date specifications and do some of the high-level architectural work (DB tables, primarily) and then lead a team to do the rest.

I have a little more time now, but the forum software project is a somewhat low priority. I have several high-priority things to fix with the current software. If you want to help, I could use a very security-conscious PHP programmer to help me maintain/improve the current SMF installation.

How about using basic open source forum software, fork it, select a leader, and create bounties for features needed here.

[Lohoris]

How about using basic open source forum software, fork it, select a leader, and create bounties for features needed here.

-->

Secondly, modifications to SMF are somewhat difficult, and some types of modifications are so difficult that they will almost certainly never be done here. (Other forum software isn't significantly better, from what I've seen.)

[infested999]

What about MyBB? I have used it before and it looks pretty good.

[Matthew N. Wright]

Why don't you use that CIYAMOpen site from the guy here (Ian Knowles) to have task based bounties Theymos? You could easily add any small features and fix bugs that way. There is plenty of money on the site for it.