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

If you have good contributions maybe it's a possibility in the future. Because we have gone off-topic and features and things are starting to show up in different threads. Let's do that. Create a thread for suggestions or features.

This thread is closed.

I am correcting you in how poorly this whole thing was handled and how sad all you have is barely anything to show (I loaded this on my dev machine half of it didn't even work ). I would love to starting code and help you guys out, how much are you going to pay me for my time?

You're right, but this repo is more than an API. It's misnamed because we were originally going to split things up more in multiple repositories. We decided we need to put this into a single repo instead for the following reasons:

1. Integration with the original forum requires some shim work that we did. You're totally right about not needing the data. And obviously our whole idea is to steal your data and sell it. (/sarcasm)
2. Supporting noscript is a big goal for us. Javascript in the browser isn't for everyone and I believe that information needs to be concise and not filled with unnecessary UI fluff.

This is my last response to you until you decide to be helpful and positive about the project. Before you insult our skills, take a look at our work and if you want to correct us in ANY way, please feel free to send over a pull request and we will evaluate it in a thread for EVERYONE to see and decide what's better. Open source means we are open to CONSTRUCTIVE criticism. Learn to contribute so that you can matter.

3 month is all you have is an api? You got to be kidding, this is a joke... 3 Months for an api, I build apis in less than 2-4 days. Come on guys you have $350k spend a little more time or hire another developer to help you. This is honestly the saddest thing ever.

Hey Gweedo,

The Github repo for the auction system has actually been public for awhile. I'm sure if you look through the Slickage profile on Github you'll find it. It's currently called Adness-API. There's also an Adness-Web for the SPA version of  the auction system. We haven't really started work on that section yet. We wanted to get the noscript version out first since that covers all users. As Wangbus said, we're finishing up right now and not taking in an issues or pull request yet. We want to finalize the alpha version before we do that.

https://github.com/slickage/adness-api

Why not make it transparent now so we can see how much work by commits are being done? How do we even know you started? I mean it is taking this long to do an ad auction system, that could be done in a week, I can't imagine the forum is going to be taking a year, it is looking like two years.

Everything going through GPG might be a possibility. I'd like to explore these options once we get the initial migration off the ground.

Although supporting the migration of this forum is the top priority, keep in mind that this is a separate product that's open sourced. We have a team that will funnel contributions from the public when the system becomes more stable.

Augusto Croppo is spot on. This is pathetic.

Perhaps an option to highlight threads created by established members or a way for user to suggest a threshold, below which new threads are hidden to them. Obviously, ignoring individual users works but I wonder the difference that just excluding new threads from those with less that X activity might be helpful. The current icons on the left of threads suggesting ?hot topics, aren't useful - perhaps those could highlight heros; friends; and users with less that 8 digit IDs  

"GPU" is also a "CPU". It is just a different name for the same concept. All algorithms use a considerable amount of processing power, whatever this power come from the main processor (CPU) or from a secondary processor (GPU).



No, this is the point you missed. You were paid $350000 (+ $750000) to develop a software from the scratch, but you cannot even implement GPG in the development because it is "CPU intensive".

LoL

If every developer was incompetent like you, we would not have this amazing "CPU intensive" algorithms to shrink the size of data being transmitted among electronic devices.

I didn't get any support on this comment before but will try again.
Could you please modify the watchlist such that a user can select from a list, threads that they want to return to (view) regardless if it has had a new post since their last visit.

Initial responses have been decent. I will be posting interesting posts to its own topic for further discussion after this week.

I agree, but it's more of a usability issue. I think users can and will get their GPG keys screwed up. We will try to put this feature in though. Just need to think about how to orchestrate it.

Actually most video games are GPU intensive and not CPU intensive, also any time you use a reasonably well written OpenGPL webpage, also CSS3 transform are all offloaded to the video card, also massive batch processing algorithms (CUDA) often make use of the GPU instead of the CPU because of the nature of the algorithm. Should I go on?

The point you've missed is that the intensive CPU processing, in this fictional scenario, all takes place on the server and not distributed on the client side.

How does it not fix that? If you have a mail server with a decent amount of cores it can use all the cores and process many at one time, I would say it should able to process about 500 emails at one time. You don't have really care about getting mail so that eliminates that processing. And if you really cared you can build your own really slim smtp server.

This only fixes one of the problems I listed, which is the mail server bogging down the web server. But it does not fix any of the other issues such as getting all the email out in a time-sensitive manner.

It is a bit weird I forgot where but there is a suggestion to use google search instead lol
Or was

LoL

Really? Tell me, which algorithm is not "CPU intensive"?

Oh dear, you guys are just pathetic... Yet another demonstration of incompetence for what you were massively paid to do.

EDIT: By the way, dear forum users, be careful to not open too many tabs in your browser with HTTPS loaded pages, it is very "CPU intensive", your computer could explode.

Or why doesn't the forum move the mail server off the web server, then BINGO who cares how long it takes because now it is off the web server. Can we just use our heads a little bit and problem solve.

GPG is a CPU intensive process. In most cases, this is not an issue because either messages are small or they are infrequent. But given the right circumstances, it could bog down the server and could be used as an attack vector much like DDOS or could even be paired with it (we need to make sure this is not possible). We have a lot of other features lined up that could be upsteam dependencies and we need to make sure that in all cases, the server is still responsive.

Let's take the email/GPG use case for example, if an email needed to be sent out to the entire user base. That email would have to be encrypted once per user and then sent out (Given everyone was using GPG). If there are (I'm making this number up) 100,000 users... Can you see how much work that would be for the CPUs? This would be on top of serving those same 100,000 user the forum as well. Now imagine if that email really didn't have anything important to say. That's a lot of work for really nothing. But what if the email did contain sensitive information? There are ways to mitigate the CPU issue by locking it down to a few or just one core but that comes with its own trade offs. The speed at which the emails are being sent out may be drastically lower. If the email isn't time-sensitive but contains sensitive information, this is fine. But what if a system wide breach of the DB were to occur and all user's login/pass were compromised. A time-sensitive and possibly information sensitive email needs to go out...

I could go on and on and keep playing what ifs. Each what if (corner case) does have a solution but some of them require that GPG is not universally used on all messages for the sake of speed. Which means more coding to ensure that logic is in place. Also, if none of the features run into issues like above then it's clearly a good idea to use GPG on everything.

This is why the idea of GPG on all communications is a toss up. It's a great idea and we'd love to implement it, but due to the nature of GPG being CPU intensive, we may need figure out a solution if two features align against each other. But since not all the forum features have been solidified, we can't make a firm decision on it right now. That's just the nature of software development.

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.

How many people are familiar with MarkDown on here?

Would updating the forum's editor to be markdown based vs. what's currently used a favorable idea?

1. As mentioned before:

• 2FA and GPG auth
• Laggy, old interface
• Lack of proper moderation
• Signatures! (although it has got better)

2.

• Ignore button
• NOT the trust system

3.

• More user profile fields - like a GPG key field
• New sleek look
• Use all that Node.js has to offer

Posted from Bitcointa.lk - #QvzOWYIac4eEXeiG

Okay, I'll freely admit that I'm biased, but here are my suggestions.

1)  The trust system that exists with SMF is a really bad idea.  It makes it easier for people like TradeFortress to scam people over the long haul.  Please make sure that the new forum software does not have this system, I really think it is a bad idea, especially with the default trust list.

Also, the bb code has a (fairly minor) flaw that I noticed a while back: I was trying to link to a URL that's https, and it wouldn't let me.  It worked when I changed the url to be http format, but I couldn't do it with the SSL formatted link.  I think this is a flaw, and while relatively minor, it'd be nice to not have to deal with it.

2) Obviously, as I'm using the quote feature with SMF, I like this feature.  I think it's useful and makes it easier to reply to people's comments. 

3) I'm going to second Cyrus's "Mark as spam" recommendation.  Also, I think a better forum search option would be useful.  Oh, and the one thing that may be useful that other forums have: a threaded reply option, where replies show up indented to the the post being replied to.  Sort of in the reddit style, I guess?  The one downside to this, however, is that if there are a lot of replies, the 10th or so reply gets really hard to read, so...I can do without it too.

4) Don't emulate Facebook features, they tend to make their UI worse over time.  Disqus is even worse, I think it doesn't even work in Firefox any more, lately.  (Unless it's my Adblock that broke it, but the rest of the internet looks fine, so I'm inclined to blame Disqus.)

1.
- sometimes it's slow
- Handling/managing/searching through hundreds of PMs is cumbersome
- no 2FA/3FA/x-FA
- the default forum search (not the Google one) without selecting some options to narrow the search results yields in strange results (I think it's only a problem for new members). But it's still limited, for example I'm unable to search for "+1 posts" by searching for <+1> or <"+1">. Yeah, I know it's the same with google, but duckduckgo works OK with special characters (if one puts the query between quotation marks) and so does symbolhound.

2.
- Stats, though I wouldn't mind them being much more detailed
- Ignore button, ignoring PMs

3.
- Wouldn't mind the forum responding a bit faster to posting, handling reports, nuking users, etc.
- 2FA/3FA/x-FA
edit: also, the Trust system, as much as the concept of DefaultTrust is very far from being ideal, it's somewhat of a protection for newbies

4.
reddit - I don't like the layout and the voting/downvoting/karmawhoring, all which do not contribute or encourage meaningful discussions, but I like the idea of subreddits.
facebook - there's a joke of a chat... and that's it, not sure if it's something needed on this forum

Those are just a few that popped into my mind now, by no means a comprehensive list.

It's great to see action regarding the new forum software, I was happy to see this new section today.
I'll try to get the ball rolling:

• Multiple Factor Authentication: Signing a Bitcoin address, Yubikey, Google Authenticator, etc.(maybe more than one, with the possibility of picking).
• Having a mobile version of sorts.
• Would be nice to have threads grouped by tags too, not just by category. It should make it easier to find similar information that might be in other sections.
• Bitcointalk.org/language would be nice to redirect towards that respective language section, and so on. This will make sharing Local subforums a lot easier!
• Perhaps something like a "Mark as spam" button, close to Report to mod. If enough members click, a red flag notifies the mods, while the post gets minimized just like when you ignore the user and gets something like a "Not Spam?" button.
• A "Say thanks" or a "+1" button could help reduce the number of "+1" posts.
• Members being notified when someone mentioned them in a post.
• A "Notifications" dropdown, where recent events are displayed(for instance, a new reply to your post, a user mentioning you in a post, etc.).

I'll edit this post and continue the list, as it is not a complete list.

Good luck Slickage.

Thanks to Theymos, we have a completely new area to talk about the forum software that is being developed. Keep in mind that the code will be created for bitcointalk.org first but will serve as general purpose forum software under the MIT license once we have it delivered and in Alpha/Beta status. Let's start off with a temperature check...

Here are a bunch of questions and topics for everyone to discuss. Please keep the conversation going, keep trolling to a minimum and before you post, please ask yourself if your post contributes to the overall goal of creating this new forum software.

1. What are the existing problems (for you) with SMF and the current state of the forum? Please list as many as you can and feel free to elaborate on the issue.
2. What are the existing features that you would want to keep? Please do not be concerned about how petty it may seem as your opinion is valuable no matter what the feature is.
3. What would you like to see added that's currently not implemented in the forum?
4. Compare and contrast vs other platforms and their features. Would they work well with these forums? Take a look at Reddit, Discourse, Hacker News, Slashdot, Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, etc etc...

The goal is to create a compelling platform that can be used for notable/historical events while keeping useless content out of the way for the consumer.

-Slickage