Topic: Kick-off Discussion: Existing Forum Temperature Check + Criticism - page 2. (Read 4257 times)

Also, personally, when I was new to the forum I found the constant "you must wait 180 seconds to do that" messages extremely annoying. There must be a better way to combat spam... Other forums don't do this. It seemed to happen almost every time I tried to post or reply, even when 3 minutes certainly seemed to have passed since my last post.

What's the toss-up?

I think the option to GPG encrypt all messages from the forum is a great idea.

That's not obvious at all. I learned it by trial and error.
The search bar appears on the top, before the current subforum title. So I expect it to search everything.

I know, I still get wacky results. Many others have made similar complaints. The forum search is fundamentally broken IMO. I do not have these types of issues on other forums.

You have to search on front page to get all results.

On subpage on results in this sub.

The search is weird. Many times I'll use the forum search to look for something and it either returns many erroneous results, or 0 results, then I Google the same exact string and the first result is a relevant thread on this forum lol.

Never mind, I think I may have answered my own question. Slickage is a apparently US company, and US companies should be expected to consistently sabotage strong encryption and user privacy.

Am I reading this correctly that you'd only encrypt "sensitive" emails from the forum if the user opts in to encryption? Why not all emails the forum sends?

This is a toss-up. Technically we can enable the option without a problem and sensitive info like password reset links and things of the like can be sent with GPG if the users opt into it.

Users should have the option to upload a GPG public key that the forum uses to encrypt all notification emails.

Alternately or in addition to this, the forum should have native Bitmessage capability. This means letting users register with Bitmessage addresses and sending notifications through the Bitmessage network. Note that routing the notification through a honeypot gateway like bitmessage.ch doesn't count because the primary purpose of Bitmessage is to not have monitoring chokepoints with access to plaintext.

It will be 100% new forum software. After viewing the forum software landscape, there weren't very many that had the exact features theymos wanted (please refer to the document mentioned in the other theymos thread), and we felt that the money was better spent building from the ground up than patching older systems to get to something theymos was asking for.

Often times in software, it's easier to build from the ground up with the latest tools. Replicating the features in existing software is quite easy and creating more advanced features become possible with little overhead. A great article about this can be found here: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html Paul Graham, is the founder of Y combinator, otherwise known in the startup circle as Hacker News. He explains how often using the latest and greatest can give you a technological advantage over those that still use older tools and methodologies. We hope to achieve the same goals with Node.js and this forum software. We have found similar success in other areas with Node.js.

Sorry if this reply is getting lengthy over a short question. I feel that many people are asking the same thing and wanted to put our intentions into written once and for all.

As for the number of developers, yes. Right now we're at two dedicated developers but that will change soon enough. It is up to the individual(s) to reveal themselves. Some of us have families and are not comfortable with the amount of scrutiny that the forum often finds itself wrapped up in. (As James and I have experienced already.)

Alright, I think this is enough. We want to keep this thread from being derailed so this will be the last question I will answer along these lines. If you want to ask more of these types of questions, please do so in another thread within this sub forum. We'd like to keep this thread specifically to the forum features.

Feature suggestion:
fully automated, trustless escrow-system
(obvious secured by multi-sig from hacking, stealing, goverments)


May I ask if a real 100% new forum is developed or an existing one is forked?
If 100% new, why?!


I read Slickage is so busy all the time.
Slickage are 4 people.
Give they are so busy, so they can max. set 2 devs on the project, I guess.

I saw the not so small feature list.

==> Whole project will take: 1,5 or 2 years, right?

Some suggestions off the top of my head:

Searching PMs by username doesn't work with the current forum (or I'm doing it wrong).
You could add a built-in auction end timer, so people know when to stop bidding and don't have to rely on external countdown .gifs.
You could add a custom field for date in Press so you could sort news by date and keep the same formatting in all thread titles.
Get rid of "1 bitcoin=$400 www.usflne.com buy now" spam bot threads

I completely agree. I want to make moderation as easy as possible with status levels to show prominence of their posts. This will encourage users post useful content.

As for noscript, there are a lot of noscript people around so supporting that is a priority with 2 user interfaces for the forum just for the web -- Noscript and >= Class A Browser.

As far as Node.js, and we can commit to scalability with a fault tolerant backend geared for replication, and introduce realtime functionality in creative ways in the future. We will also begin to accept contributors once the alpha version is out.

Well glad to see this is now its own section

For questions most of the ones I had were addressed in the current requirements document
So I guess i'll relate to point one
Users control their own experience. Don't worry about adding too many options and features. Don't be restrictive.
What type of other ideas real or theoretical do you think would improve the user experience
Example: Prezi style posting instead of traditional posts perhaps would be kind of neat to see presentations instead of documents now and then on topic or a place to view Bitcoin based presentations.  

3. I would like a feature where you can tag or add reminders/notes on other users (which are private and only you can see).  This could be a short string which appears beneath the username next to each post.  This would be useful for notes like: possible scammer, alt of XXX, developer/owner of YYY.  Maybe it's just my old brain needing constant reminders.

Alternatively, a feature where you can rate each member (like, neutral, dislike) which again only you can see beneath the username next to each post.  The results are accumulated to provide a public global rating for each member (similar to the ignore system but allows positive as well as negative feedback).  I find on other forums that this encourages users to make more productive posts so as to maintain a positive global rating.  An example of this is the smiley system used at http://forums.whirlpool.net.au (you need to be logged in to see it) and is described in the wiki:  http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/wp_smileysystem.

 As a simple user I wish there was a quick way to view a list of threads I have put on the watchlist, I want to be able to quickly return to a thread even if it hasn't had a new recent post.

Markdown is OK for simple things, but it's too weird and verbose for more complex stuff. I especially don't like how you have to indent every line to make a code block, and how you have to put two spaces at the end of a line to make the next single line break "real".

I would like it if *italic*/**bold** or ''italic''/'''bold''' (wiki syntax) worked. Typing [i] and [b] takes too long. Lists could maybe also be improved.