- More money is better than less money. I'm not going to turn down donations when people want to donate. (Though when asked, I often recommend that people not donate.) I'm not going to stop selling ads even though the forum probably has "enough" money. It's not bad for the forum to have extra money. It will be used on something useful at some point. If you don't like this, don't donate.
- More than half of the forum's money is from ads, not donations.
- During the school year, I am a full time student. I barely have time to administrate the forum.
- When I do have time, there are many interesting/important/fun things that compete for my attention. I don't spend all day working on the forum. I've certainly not been working full-time for 12 months on vaporware forum software...
I am still very interested in creating new forum software, and we probably now have enough money to do it. SMF works alright (definitely not perfectly), but there are two main problems with it that require more than just some modifications. Firstly, the coding style is generally insecure. It's very easy to introduce new security flaws, and it's likely that SMF has unknown security flaws. Secondly, modifications to SMF are somewhat difficult, and some types of modifications are so difficult that they will almost certainly never be done here. (Other forum software isn't significantly better, from what I've seen.)
There is unfortunately no magical machine which takes money and creates excellent software or hires a team of competent people. I'm not quite sure how best to turn the money into a good software product. I originally intended to give someone a bunch of money and have them handle the whole thing. I talked with dozens of people interested in doing this, but none of them made me totally confident. A while ago I decided that I will probably never be confident in any one person/company handling the entire project because I've thought about it much longer than they have (2 years), and I have many details about how it should work in my mind. So I probably need to get closer to the development process. My current plan is to write some detailed up-to-date specifications and do some of the high-level architectural work (DB tables, primarily) and then lead a team to do the rest.
I have a little more time now, but the forum software project is a somewhat low priority. I have several high-priority things to fix with the current software. If you want to help, I could use a very security-conscious PHP programmer to help me maintain/improve the current SMF installation.
I hoped you considered some of my ideas. I do think we need a completely redesigned forum designed for cryptocurrencies. SMF is not designed for making trades, or for tipping, or for microtransactions, all which could provide security and monetize the forum. Microtransactions would discourage spamming for instance. Lotteries could be built into threads for instance. Trades could be built into threads with escrow.
There is a lot which would be possible with a forum which is designed to handle cryptocurrencies. My suggestion is you should hire some contractors who have world class skill and put them to work on building a new forum. If you get this right you'll probably become a millionaire from the new forum technology. You have thousands of Bitcoins to work with so why not a contest to see who can come up with the best new forum design and reward 1 Bitcoin to the winner, then take it from there?
Or if you have the idea yourself why not just give us a white paper or specs and let us peer review it? If it has any weaknesses the community will certainly find it.
Frankly, this forum software seems perfectly fine for the job it is doing right now
It has strengths and weaknesses. For debate and conversation it's nice, but for anything business related or for cryptocurrencies it's not so great. People are having to use Google docs to trade and group buys aren't even efficiently handled.
Why don't you use that CIYAMOpen site from the guy here (Ian Knowles) to have task based bounties Theymos? You could easily add any small features and fix bugs that way. There is plenty of money on the site for it.
There are a lot of big brains in this forum and it would be nice see some cooperation to bring a new forum to the table, especially if that can offer all the crypto kung fu, ratings, top security, and all. Descentralize the tasks, Theymos!
I don't know how many hits this forum gets but it's big, big like MtGox is big. I think certain features would be in so much demand that people would pay for the development of the desired features. I know if you add trading functionality to this place it would be worth it to pay for it. When a new coin launches and people are mining it we should be able to have people buying and selling it on the forum, why not?
But this would make the forum an exchange so I can understand the legal implications.
