Where's the new forum Theymos?

[waldohoover]

Well to update to just another forum platform seems quite pointless, since this one serves the purpose of exchanging messages just fine. If something needs to be done it has to be a more radical change. But the problem is in which direction.
Crowdsourcing ideas seems like a modern way of evolution, so an idea and work rewarding modular platform is probably a good candidate. Users could post their own ideas and/or vote/give bounty to them. If the ideas can be planned into milestones, then users achieving those milestones could claim the bounty or at least a portion of it. Maybe smaller tasks that are more achievable would speed up the development of the project. But most importantly, the vox populi would steer the direction of development.

The main feature everyone is waiting for is one-click mini-donations to posts. Nobody can say this is a bad idea since it works perfectly for the Bitcoin subreddit.

Just an FYI the bitcointip works across ALL of Reddit, not just the bitcoin subreddit!

[pmlyon]

Has the discourse.org forum software been looked at? It looks brilliant, imo.

http://www.discourse.org/

http://try.discourse.org/

[gweedo]

Has the discourse.org forum software been looked at? It looks brilliant, imo.

http://www.discourse.org/

http://try.discourse.org/

YES and discourse is horrible! It is written on RoR just waiting for a security attack.

[pmlyon]

Has the discourse.org forum software been looked at? It looks brilliant, imo.

http://www.discourse.org/

http://try.discourse.org/

YES and discourse is horrible! It is written on RoR just waiting for a security attack.

What do you find horrible about it? I haven't used it in practice.

[Rassah]

There is actually another reason for all this money, which theymos has been trying to keep under wraps. As bitcoin is becoming more popular, it is now being targeted by government agencies, like FinCEN, NSA, etc. and more government meddling is expected. There is expectation that main communication hubs, like this forum, will become major targets for governments to take down, in order to try to disrupt bitcoin itself. So the plan is to use this money to move the server into a location that will be impossible for governments to raid and shut down. Specifically, theymos is going to be buying a small drone that will be carrying a lightweight server, and will stay in the air almost 24x7. The large amount of money will mostly be used to pay for a satellite data connection, and refueling costs to keep it aloft.

[fluffypony]

Has the discourse.org forum software been looked at? It looks brilliant, imo.

http://www.discourse.org/

http://try.discourse.org/

YES and discourse is horrible! It is written on RoR just waiting for a security attack.

What do you find horrible about it? I haven't used it in practice.

RoR is a VERY bad choice at this stage if you want a secure site. You shouldn't need to worry about the language you're writing in suffering from underlying security concerns. I like RoR, but it's not ready for something like this.

[Scott J]

There is actually another reason for all this money, which theymos has been trying to keep under wraps. As bitcoin is becoming more popular, it is now being targeted by government agencies, like FinCEN, NSA, etc. and more government meddling is expected. There is expectation that main communication hubs, like this forum, will become major targets for governments to take down, in order to try to disrupt bitcoin itself. So the plan is to use this money to move the server into a location that will be impossible for governments to raid and shut down. Specifically, theymos is going to be buying a small drone that will be carrying a lightweight server, and will stay in the air almost 24x7. The large amount of money will mostly be used to pay for a satellite data connection, and refueling costs to keep it aloft.

While this is very funny, there is also good point to it - having funds to negate a legal attack on the forum could be very important in the future.

I don't know how the pirate bay manage their hosting, but they seem to be untouchable. If we need to go down that route at some point it could cost a fair bit, I assume?

Also having funds stashed for a potential legal defense is never a bad idea.

[rme]

Please start forking an Open Source forum CMS project now.
Offer bounties for some work, public the github, let the community find bugs.

Open a thread to suggest features (bitcointip bot, etc.).

Find a secure host for the forums.
I would reccomend a system like Piratebay's one, one main server and dozens of vps in different countries proxying from main server to users.

If bitcointalk.org is ddosed only vps are ddosed, if bitcointalk.org ip is blocked only vps ip is blocked, if vps is shut down you dont lose any data.
People dont know real server's IP address, also setup cloudflare in front of that system.

So when someone conects:
User -> Cloudflare -> VPS -> Main server

VPS is a proxy only, only redirects traffic, like a load balancer.

 

[rme]

While this is very funny, there is also good point to it - having funds to negate a legal attack on the forum could be very important in the future.

I don't know how the pirate bay manage their hosting, but they seem to be untouchable. If we need to go down that route at some point it could cost a fair bit, I assume?

Also having funds stashed for a potential legal defense is never a bad idea.

I have explained just below your post, thepiratebay uses vps with their O.S. running only in RAM (no HDD is used) and they proxy connections to the real server.
If a server is shutted down only the proxy (vps) is shutted down, no data lose.

[Scott J]

While this is very funny, there is also good point to it - having funds to negate a legal attack on the forum could be very important in the future.

I don't know how the pirate bay manage their hosting, but they seem to be untouchable. If we need to go down that route at some point it could cost a fair bit, I assume?

Also having funds stashed for a potential legal defense is never a bad idea.

I have explained just below your post, thepiratebay uses vps with their O.S. running only in RAM (no HDD is used) and they proxy connections to the real server.
If a server is shutted down only the proxy (vps) is shutted down, no data lose.

Thanks, I just read your post and it's pretty similar to how I imagined it to work. It's pretty ingenious really and seems like a great idea for here. 

[Rassah]

While this is very funny, there is also good point to it - having funds to negate a legal attack on the forum could be very important in the future.

I don't know how the pirate bay manage their hosting, but they seem to be untouchable. If we need to go down that route at some point it could cost a fair bit, I assume?

Also having funds stashed for a potential legal defense is never a bad idea.

Actually, it was thepiratebay that floated this "server in the literal clouds" idea in the first place.

[r3wt]

making an SMF database work with another forum software would be quite the undertaking in and of its self... just build from smf. even a rookie can do it. the trick is maintaining the security features and proffesional level of coding presented in the smf forum software.

[4mherewego]

This forum should have some donation options so you can give one satoshi to posts you like. Like reddit does it.

[Raize]

I'd be willing to look over PHP code for security bugs/holes. I used to program in PHP regularly, and even wrote a few exploits for IE/Firefox in my prime, but haven't been doing this stuff regularly for 5 years now that I'm a settled sysadmin. I wouldn't feel comfortable being the only one looking at it. Also, I don't feel comfortable taking money, which is probably why someone else ought to do it, but I would recommend more than one security auditor look at the code in order to keep each other honest given the extreme importance of just exactly what this forum contains.

This forum should have some donation options so you can give one satoshi to posts you like. Like reddit does it.

Yeah see, it's ideas like this that sound great, but scare the living hell out of me given a lack of two-factor encryption and this forum being an out-of-the box PHP software package with pretty regular exploits.

[🏰 TradeFortress 🏰]

How about this Bitcoin lending thing that is running now?  They ask for Bitcoins and they pretend to run a bank yet they don't even give a street address and they hide their identity with whois privacy.  Who in their right minds would accept an ad for financial services under those conditions?

What is ASICMINER's street address? Does friedcat even have a domain? People do know who I am / where I live, FYI.

Investments in bitcoin are quite different from investments in fiat. I'm not aware of any securities offerings on this forum that are registered and approved by the SEC or other similar regulatory offering.

[🏰 TradeFortress 🏰]

Where did I say everybody? There is a couple of reasons why I hide my whois info, and scamming is not one of the reasons or something that I'd do. If I wanted to scam, I would actually use my identity, go to DEFCON (lol), and then run. I'd rather make CoinLenders last, even in a situation where cryptocurrencies are outlawed.

[dwdoc]

In case the new forum turns us all back into newbies I've started planning out my first 5 posts...

[Matthew N. Wright]

Where did I say everybody? There is a couple of reasons why I hide my whois info, and scamming is not one of the reasons or something that I'd do. If I wanted to scam, I would actually use my identity, go to DEFCON (lol), and then run. I'd rather make CoinLenders last, even in a situation where cryptocurrencies are outlawed.

I'm pretty sure I know what one of those reasons is. (Libel suit anyone?)

[🏰 TradeFortress 🏰]

I am not going to elaborate more on that.

[JordanL]

- 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.

sick