.

[Wangbus]

@Wangbus, teasup

Was theymos able to see any of your NDA'd code/portfolio?

Yes and we talked about the technical pieces regarding this implementation for a while now. We were approached and connected via other parties so I wasn't aware of the other thread on this forum. Like I said, we'll do our best and everything will be open source for public eyes to see. I am a community leader and there is a lot of information about me on the Internet if you want to dig. I actually don't update my public resume anymore, but please add me on LinkedIn if you guys would like more information. I've been focusing solely on my company.

[KFR]

When they hear things like "doing you a favor" and "Twitter isn't profitable and it cost millions", are people supposed to be encouraged?

If anyone thinks a million dollars is in any way appropriate - or frankly even $350k - for a custom forum build then I've got a bridge or two I'd like to sell them.

[gweedo]

A typical programmer costs around the price of about 80k a year (that's low for Silicon Valley too). Which comes out to about 37 an hour. All companies need to pay for benefits, overhead, rent, electricity, etc on TOP of paying out a employee. So normally you would charge a rate around 2 to 3 times the salary of a employee. That's already around 114 an hour, or 240k a year. And there's already more than one employee working on the bitcoin forums... so yea.

This could be a long-term business agreement, why drive these people away before they even have a chance to release a working prototype? The current agreement is provisional, the amount paid should cover a few months' work. Then people will actually have something to modify, fork, and perfect.

How many pages did the original bounty thread have to continue before theymos realized it was futile, professional endeavors need professional networks. I worry about the expertise that's been squandered here in the past from vitriol and mob psychology.

Thank you shil, but you are really the only person here that can't talk because you didn't track the right people, so yeah your opinions don't count. Let business people, that are living in the real world.

$1 million dollars for a forum, is insane! Any custom software, that is not enterprise level that cost more than $150K is insane! I am a freelancer I know the price. Also they already admitted that this is not going to be a full time project, they have other projects. That for sure doesn't warrant the $1 million price tag.

For $350K I rather not see the prototype. $350K for a little bit of work which they will turn over to the open source community give me a break, to do thru bug hunting and adding to it. Come on this is $150K max for the whole thing. Theymos get your head out of the sand this donation money now listen to the community we don't want this!!!!!

[Kouye]

I'm pretty dissapointed that some of the money will go for an automated ad auction system, that will only work on a dying forum software, and will need to be ported to the new custom one after that. Is that really necessary?

[Wangbus]

Auction system is a detail. The forum is the main project.

On top of that, the ads generate revenue for the site so that's very important.

[escrow.ms]

Well I agree with others, 1 million dollar for a opensource forum software is pretty a big amount, It's like paying 1 million dollar for a pizza now (that lazlo ate in 2010 )

If theymos have paid 5500 BTC for a new forum software in 2011, no one would have asked a question because bitcoins price was low that time, but now even 1000 BTC is too much.

[escrow.ms]

@Wangbus, How much time it will take to migrate/convert this forum into a new one, after new forum software will be ready?

[Kouye]

@Wangbus, How much time it will take to migrate/convert this forum into a new one, after new forum software will be ready?

That's a good question. I hope for that price everyone will get to keep their watchlist, and all the negative trust (and none of the positive one, because it's BAD).

But what I'd like, here, really, is to gain access to the specifications you're working with.
And for each feature, I'd like to have a workload estimate, and a progress bar.

How many people will work on this, btw?

[Wangbus]

Within the first 3 months, I'd like to have an initial version up of the new forum software. Migration will happen afterwards. I'm not sure about how long this will take yet.

[Justin00]

im pretty sure goat expects current rate + 80% interest for his time + another 80% for loss of income + a dinner with theymos in vegas

Just out of curiosity all of you who want a refund of your donations are you expecting straight XBT refund or fiat equivalent and why?  Also why did you donate at the time if those questions weren't answered?

Since the forum donation levels are pegged to BTC, they obviously want a refund in BTC. Works both ways you know 

So someone donated to the forums a few years back at $10/XBT and let's say the forum spent that XBT on hosting or some other minor things.  So by your logic where will these refunds come from now; out of the current donations, theymos' pocket, or where from exactly?  Is every later donator supposed to basically subsidize these refunds and give a profit to earlier donators?

[KFR]

A typical programmer costs around the price of about 80k a year (that's low for Silicon Valley too). Which comes out to about 37 an hour. All companies need to pay for benefits, overhead, rent, electricity, etc on TOP of paying out a employee. So normally you would charge a rate around 2 to 3 times the salary of a employee. That's already around 114 an hour, or 240k a year. And there's already more than one employee working on the bitcoin forums... so yea.

With all due respect, that sounds disturbingly like naive and commercially inexperienced programmer accounting and not real world business accounting.

I currently employ twelve developers, run two software development companies and have been doing that kind of things for many years.  From my perspective the figures you're quoting here are nonsense.

Maybe it makes some sense if you can only employ people from California, one of the most expensive places on Earth for this kind of thing by the way.  But even then it's a pretty generous arrangement.

I don't care how you cut it:

If anyone thinks a million dollars is in any way appropriate - or frankly even $350k - for a custom forum build then I've got a bridge or two I'd like to sell them.

[theymos]

I'm pretty dissapointed that some of the money will go for an automated ad auction system, that will only work on a dying forum software, and will need to be ported to the new custom one after that. Is that really necessary?

The auction system is written in Node. It will be able to be used with the new software without much modification.

[gweedo]

I'm pretty dissapointed that some of the money will go for an automated ad auction system, that will only work on a dying forum software, and will need to be ported to the new custom one after that. Is that really necessary?

The auction system is written in Node. It will be able to be used with the new software without much modification.

You answer one question? Come on we need answers. Please don't just ignore questions.

[User705]

A typical programmer costs around the price of about 80k a year (that's low for Silicon Valley too). Which comes out to about 37 an hour. All companies need to pay for benefits, overhead, rent, electricity, etc on TOP of paying out a employee. So normally you would charge a rate around 2 to 3 times the salary of a employee. That's already around 114 an hour, or 240k a year. And there's already more than one employee working on the bitcoin forums... so yea.

With all due respect, that sounds disturbingly like naive and commercially inexperienced programmer accounting and not real world business accounting.

I currently employ twelve developers, run two software development companies and have been doing that kind of things for many years.  From my perspective the figures you're quoting here are nonsense.

Maybe it makes some sense if you can only employ people from California, one of the most expensive places on Earth for this kind of thing by the way.  But even then it's a pretty generous arrangement.

I don't care how you cut it:

If anyone thinks a million dollars is in any way appropriate - or frankly even $350k - for a custom forum build then I've got a bridge or two I'd like to sell them.

I think the forum does need a bridge.

It's time all us trolls get something over our heads!

+1
I'm curious if the price was fiat or XBT.  The way the exchange rate is going nowadays who knows it might end up costing more then 5000XBT.

[taesup]

I hope for that price everyone will get to keep their watchlist, and all the negative trust (and none of the positive one, because it's BAD).

But what I'd like, here, really, is to gain access to the specifications you're working with.
And for each feature, I'd like to have a workload estimate, and a progress bar.

How many people will work on this, btw?

Thank you Kouye! This is the type of feedback we're looking for. Although we can copy as much of the functionality as possible from SMF to ease the transition from this forum to the next. It's up to you guys to help point out the features that are essentially broken or could be better in other ways.

As for the specification, once we make the Github account public, you can track our progress and issues there. You can even submit your own issues as you guys use the new software.

As for the number of people working on the forum, Wangbus and I have volunteered to go public (and thrown to the trolls) but we do not feel it's fair to others (if there are any.  ) for us to release that information. Is this a cheap cop out? In essence, yes. But that's the best I can do given the circumstances. You can assume there's at least two of us.



For everyone else, we understand your concerns and agree that they are valid concerns. I would be just as skeptical about "some company" coming in and trying to sell some million dollar software. The best we can offer is that we are professional Software Engineers. You have our day to day / professional handles. The information about us is out there. You will probably come to your own conclusions as many have. We cannot sway those conclusions with just words. We hope that as we start releasing software, we can start to change your perceptions. We hope that we can work with the community to build better software.

[Maged]

While I can't answer for theymos, I thought that I would at least provide my thoughts to the discussion.

I still don't get why you require a $1 million payday. Don't you think that is a little high? If you are serious about creating the next big forum why not start with $150K build something that is a fairly good prototype then raise some seed funding? I just can't wrap my head around a $1 million payment for some forum software.

Because there is not much money if forum software anymore. Jeff Atwood got his seed funding for Discourse off of name recognition alone. If you disagree with this statement, please give me a list of startups that started in the last five years that are working on new forum software, along with how much funding they've received (if available). I am genuinely curious to see how much attention forums have received from VCs and angel investors recently.

I have worked on custom CRMs, and custom software, but I never got anywhere close to $1 million, 6 figures yes. Are you saying that this forum project is on scale of a enterprise system?

I would argue that it is. First and foremost, this new forum software is being made for us and us alone. Sure, we're giving it away to the public, but that's besides the point. Since it's hard to make a case that there is still much money to be made in forums (as I brought up above and might be wrong about), software companies entered negotiations with us believing that we could very well be the only paying customer. We wanted this done now, no matter what, and we could afford it, so we stuck with that belief and compensated them accordingly. In return, we required them to make the project be open-source. They can act as the official distributor, maintain the official repo, and provide consulting services (much like wordpress), but they can NEVER require anybody to buy any of the code that they produce for us.

Again, I would love to be proven wrong in my assumption that people aren't investing in new forum software anymore, because at least then there will be some innovation outside of our platform to look forward to and integrate in the future. But as it is, we've already paid our initial deposit, so there's no point in arguing that we should have paid less. Instead, look for reasons why we should get more for our money. Convince them that outside investors can and will fund the rest of the project.

[Maged]

From a project (Bitcoin) that is so democratic, they are a lot of tyrants around these business and controlling groups.

I hate to say it, but at the end of the day, dictators get things done. If new forum software were just a nice thing to have sometime in the next ten or so years, then theymos absolutely made the wrong call. However, we needed new 21st century forum technology here two (three?) years ago, so I can't fault theymos too badly for just going ahead with this on his own. I just hope that he realizes that if this goes bad, he is solely responsible for the outcome. Since I don't wish ill fortune against theymos, I'm hopeful that this will turn out just fine and we'll all be able to laugh about this later.

[surfer43]

Just a request, please create a sub-forum for this project sooner rather than later. It would be helpful to have organized discussions where people could address specific concerns with SMF and propose solutions.

Good idea.

[jhansen858]

I want one mother fucker here to step forward if you even contributed more then $500 in bit coin at the time that you gave it.

sure it's worth millions now but at the time that 5500 coins was worth less then 100k.

I feel like its super hypocritical that some of you are assigning 2 different values to the same money.

this million dollar software is getting bought with $20k worth of donations. your getting a great deal.

[augustocroppo]

Because there is not much money if forum software anymore. Jeff Atwood got his seed funding for Discourse off of name recognition alone. If you disagree with this statement, please give me a list of startups that started in the last five years that are working on new forum software, along with how much funding they've received (if available). I am genuinely curious to see how much attention forums have received from VCs and angel investors recently.

I would argue that it is. First and foremost, this new forum software is being made for us and us alone. Sure, we're giving it away to the public, but that's besides the point. Since it's hard to make a case that there is still much money to be made in forums (as I brought up above and might be wrong about), software companies entered negotiations with us believing that we could very well be the only paying customer. We wanted this done now, no matter what, and we could afford it, so we stuck with that belief and compensated them accordingly. In return, we required them to make the project be open-source. They can act as the official distributor, maintain the official repo, and provide consulting services (much like wordpress), but they can NEVER require anybody to buy any of the code that they produce for us.

Again, I would love to be proven wrong in my assumption that people aren't investing in new forum software anymore, because at least then there will be some innovation outside of our platform to look forward to and integrate in the future. But as it is, we've already paid our initial deposit, so there's no point in arguing that we should have paid less. Instead, look for reasons why we should get more for our money. Convince them that outside investors can and will fund the rest of the project.

"We"? There is no "we". You did not participated in the decision and it is not your money. So stop with this "we" bullshit, OK?

I hate to say it, but at the end of the day, dictators get things done. If new forum software were just a nice thing to have sometime in the next ten or so years, then theymos absolutely made the wrong call. However, we needed new 21st century forum technology here two (three?) years ago, so I can't fault theymos too badly for just going ahead with this on his own. I just hope that he realizes that if this goes bad, he is solely responsible for the outcome. Since I don't wish ill fortune against theymos, I'm hopeful that this will turn out just fine and we'll all be able to laugh about this later.

LoL

The only thing that Michael got done until now is a flawed trust system and an activity counter...