LEAKED - Latest status on forum software

[btcmad1337]

In December and January I paid a total of about $350,000 of forum funds to hire Slickage Studios, a software development firm. I plan to officially announce this on Monday. At the same time, the firm will start interfacing directly with the community to get ideas for the new forum. Not all ideas will be accepted, and the design will not be decided through voting, but the community's input will be seriously considered. Additionally, some people from the community will eventually be selected by me and others to participate in a development committee that will oversee the creation of the new software.

The estimated total time until SMF can be entirely replaced is 1 year, though pre-release versions of the new software will be available much earlier. In the meantime, I plan on continuing my (slow) development of our fork of SMF for at least ~9 months. I might upgrade to SMF 2.0 if this isn't too difficult. I hope that I will be able to enable avatar uploading and themes. I might hire someone to do a security audit, though perhaps the security bounties are sufficient. Despite past incidents (only one of which was actually due to a flaw in SMF), I feel OK about SMF's security while it's in the reduced-functionality state in which I have it in now.

I recently did a ton of accounting work (for tax calculation), so I can offer some statistics about the forum's finances up to 2013:
- Total income: 7731.42 BTC
- Income from donations: 3113.62 (58,546.99 USD at time of tx)
- Income from ads: 4617.80 (265,792.42 USD at time of tx)
- Total expenses: 929.09 BTC (+ 331.48 in 2014 so far)

As you can see, most of the forum's current wealth is from BTC value increases. USD income isn't so high.

I consider money that was donated to be earmarked for things like:
- Hosting expenses (currently zero)
- Server operation/development (such as a sysadmin, if one is ever hired)
- Legal expenses
- Software development
- Other things that are necessary for the forum itself to survive and thrive

I consider money obtained through ads to be unrestricted except that the money can't be taken as any kind of dividend. It must be used in reasonable non-profit ways. Currently, around 25% of monthly ad income is used to pay moderators. The forum's reserve of money is never used for this. In the future, I'm likely to use a large percentage of forum ad revenue and maybe even some unrestricted reserves to pay someone to work on Bitcoin Core full-time for a couple years. Donated money will never be used for this kind of thing -- that's only for operating the forum itself. (I probably would allow donators to move their donated funds into the unrestricted fund so that they can be used for things that are probably more useful.)

Who the fuck is Slickage Studios and why did he so easily part with that kind of monies without telling the community?
And a year? This is worse than BFL's "just two more weeks".

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[CanaryInTheMine]

Interesting....
First there's bitching about nothing being done...
Now that there's something being done, there's continued bitching...

Do you remember the golden rule?

[btcmad1337]

Interesting....
First there's bitching about nothing being done...
Now that there's something being done, there's continued bitching...

It doesn't need to be this complicated. Theymos seems to be making a bigger deal out of this than is necessary. He spends 2 years talking about it and then claims "it's coming" and now turns around and says "another year" after giving $350k to some random software development "company" who do not have a website.

There are plenty of good forum software packages out there (Theymos please take 5 minutes to have a look at FluxBB I know you would like it) and it shouldn't take 3 years and cost $350k to build one from scratch.

[tysat]

The big deal is that there's zero transparency on this issue

[augustocroppo]

http://hbe.ehawaii.gov/documents/business.html?fileNumber=93287C5&view=info



In accordance with the information found in the above link, the Slickage company was registered on 13 February 2013 and Jian Shi Wang was appointed as manager.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/slickage-studios



http://www.linkedin.com/in/wangbus



https://index.docker.io/u/slickage/



http://htdc.org/Clients_Tenants



http://slickage.com/



https://npmjs.org/~wangbus



http://wangb.us/

[escrow.ms]

Who knows if James wang is satoshi or slickage is his company.  
Jk, Looks like it's real
http://hicapacity.org/page3/

You can find bitcoin, Nodejs and james wang on same page, they did some events in 2013

[bitpop]

So this is how satoshi cashes out

[btcmad1337]

I deep-searched the asian dude. He's a node.js guy
.
Is the new forum software going to use javascript?

If one line of javascript appears on bitcointalk.org, me and my sockpuppets are leaving forever. That will be the sign that the forum has gone full-hipster.

[bitpop]

I deep-searched the asian dude. He's a node.js guy
.
Is the new forum software going to use javascript?

If one line of javascript appears on bitcointalk.org, me and my sockpuppets are leaving forever. That will be the sign that the forum has gone full-hipster.

That's server side bro
But I'm sure JavaScript will be used, it already is lol

[btcmad1337]

That's server side bro
But I'm sure JavaScript will be used, it already is lol

What I meant was that javascript would be required for the website to function. I'm not whitelisting bitcointalk.org. Typically node.js requires javascript to run on the client as well as server, I think thats by design. My knowledge of it is limited. I hate javascript because it is evil.

[bitpop]

That's server side bro
But I'm sure JavaScript will be used, it already is lol

What I meant was that javascript would be required for the website to function. I'm not whitelisting bitcointalk.org. Typically node.js requires javascript to run on the client as well as server, I think thats by design. My knowledge of it is limited. I hate javascript because it is evil.

Node is just a server it doesn't require client JavaScript ever. That's up to the developer. It doesn't magically change html all into JavaScript.

But yes I hate these new hipster languages.

[btcmad1337]

Node is just a server it doesn't require client JavaScript ever. That's up to the developer. It doesn't magically change html all into JavaScript.

But yes I hate these new hipster languages.

I had a quick read. Yes your right it doesn't require client-side js. It essentially functions as any "real" "normal" webserver would without it and doesn't do all the "event-driven" stuff which kinda makes using it pointless.

But anyway, this is the way I see it.

Normal websites only have to worry about automated vulnerability scanners, weak admin passwords and common misconfigurations when it comes to security.

BitcoinTalk.org is in a different kind of situation. It is in the cross-fire of cyber-warfare. Plenty of malicious hackers use this website for nefarious and non-nefarious reasons. It is likely to be the target of 0day exploits. Anything that runs on BitcoinTalk.org needs to be battle-hardened. We should be running OLD software that is known to be highly secure and stable. 3 year old web servers are a definite no go. We should be using 30 year old web server software. Some hacker would be browsing the forums one day, accidentally break something some hipster wrote yesterday and then realize they've just found a 0day in node.js and decide to own the forum.

[bitpop]

Stupid kids want a shiny forum

[escrow.ms]

We should be running OLD software that is known to be highly secure and stable. 3 year old web servers are a definite no go. We should be using 30 year old web server software. Some hacker would be browsing the forums one day, accidentally break something some hipster wrote yesterday and then realize they've just found a 0day in node.js and decide to own the forum.

Vbulletin 3.8.7 PL3
It's super secure, this version never got hacked yet.

But Hell, current software is good too.

[Mahn]

This would be good news actually. Honestly, nothing would get done if this had to be discussed endlessly in the community, hiring a professional studio may actually get it done.

[farlack]

350k holy shit, we only wanted a donation button for tips..

You should have wasted the money on a superbowl ad.

[bitpop]

For $350K I can do the whole forum, and in less than a year. Also what happen to people that had to build the most of the forum software and show it to the community thread? Theymos we need answers and now.

Thank you leak, you did this community a service!

Sorry, satoshi has to get paid without moving his stash

[Morbo]

Satoshi claimed to be Japanese, this Wang guy is rather Chinese.

Might be TradeFortress again not Satoshi   

[Raize]

We should be using 30 year old web server software.

Even Mosaic is only 21.

I remember when trolling was an art form and people put a lot of thought into it.

[bitpop]

Satoshi claimed to be Japanese, this Wang guy is rather Chinese.

Might be TradeFortress again not Satoshi   

i would lol so hard if it was TF.

Then maybe theymos needs to cash out

Wtf kind of shit is this, building a software studio for one fucking forum