Okay, so it looks as if the dev is finished with this one. I've looked a little into decentralized forums. They claimed what they were working on was based on aether (
http://getaether.net/) which is a decentralized version of reddit. Though interesting it's still a bit of a work in progress and has one or two limitations that don't make it very suitable for a crypto board: identities aren't continuous and images aren't supported. I guess it could be argued that the no pics thing might lead to more substantive discussions, but the identities issue is pretty much a killer blow.
I'm going to continue looking into it. I'm going to be honest here though, I'm no great programmer so this will be a labour of love. And a part time one at that (I haven't the time or a big enough stake in this to justify anything more). A developer I'm quite friendly with has said that he will help where he can, but again this will be when he has the time. Basically... it's highly unlikely anyone is going to make much money out of this. But I think a decentralized forum would be a major boon to the community and the problems involved are interesting, so I'll see what I can do.
If we're going to do this at all though there will probably need to be a coin swap in order to move to a codebase in our control. It also gives us the option to fork from something a little more interesting. The user Fartbags has made a thread discussing what he considers transparent coin swap guidelines:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/transparent-crypto-coin-swap-guidelines-880220I have started some guidelines for coins thinking of doing a coin swap.
Transparent Coin Swap Guidelines:
#1 All wallets are forward compatible. Original wallets must work with new blockchains.
#2 Automatic payouts. Find all the addresses + balances. Send back all the coins in the first block of the new blockchain.
#3 Maintain copies of the older blockchains through multiple channels of distribution. Advanced work can be done to create a custom block explorer that combines both blockchains allowing users to search through both seamlessly as 1 chain.
I'm not sure if it'd be possible to do this and adhere to all of those, but that's something I'll be looking into over the next few days too. Please let me know your thoughts and feelings on the proposal and I'll post again with more details soon. Also if the project is something you can contribute to in any way please let me know.