I think I'll just leave this here, it's old but I guess theymos has not changed his mind yet so...
The software is substantially complete. The main period of development was a while ago; the current work is mainly just maintenance & relatively minor improvements. Try running it yourself and you'll find that it's working, fast, and nearly feature-complete.
The things blocking a transition from the current software to the new software are:
- There hasn't been enough testing. I think that immediately after transition, a variety of small missed features, bugs, and performance issues would crop up. As a result, if the transition happened now (which is technically possible!), I'd expect the post-transition user experience to be poor for months while these things are fixed, which I don't want.
- I am the only bitcointalk.org sysadmin and on-demand programmer, and I'm used to the current software. Furthermore, I need to frequently make changes to the current software, but each change I make might require alterations to Epochtalk, which is problematic.
- The current PHP software, while ugly and sub-optimal in many ways, performs well, especially since I have extensively modified the backend to add features and improve performance. So I don't feel much urgency.
- The data-transition procedure still has a few known minor bugs.
We continue to work on these issues. I think that ultimately I may need to hire one or more full-time people, since a big problem is that the full transition is likely to create a ton of work which I won't be able to effectively handle alone.
The software is not vaporware (it's long existed in a runnable state, and is currently basically feature-complete), and is not abandoned (look at the git commit log). If anyone is unhappy with the progress, I invite them to take the Epochtalk code and create a competing forum with it; since they won't have to worry about the transition issues, they'd have a much easier time, and their testing will also end up helping us.
In short: If you want the software quicker, go run your own forum with it, and work to get any problems or missing features you find resolved via bug reports, etc. This would increase public interest, provide much-needed testing, and I might even hire you to work on bitcointalk.org when we're ready to do the final transition here.
