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".
