chainbb.com - going offline
It's a hard decision, but at this point I feel it's the right one to make. As I alluded to in my potential witness roadmap, I'm currently focusing on other needed aspects of the ecosystem and haven't given proper attention to chainbb.com or it's users. This has been a constant source of stress for me, as morally I feel that I can't just ignore problems when they arise with the site.
Today, after running into issues with chainbb's servers and the steemd node powering it, I decided to shut down the site and refund anyone who's actually sent any funds to create/fund a forum.
If you're one of the chainbb users who has created a forum, you'll find a refund transfer for each transfer you made to the @chainbb account with a memo explaining what it was a refund for. These refunds were sent back to the account sent the transfer, or in the case that it was sent from an exchange, sent to the owner of the forum.
All pages on chainbb.com now display a message about the site shutting down, and I'll very likely shut down the servers in the near future (before the next billing cycle).
The code for it's backend is open source as well as the frontend interface. I'd welcome anyone to use it to learn from or build something with it!
To date it's still my favorite way to interact with the Steem blockchain and while I'm sad to see it shut down, this will give me breathing room to move onto other priorities while not feeling a sense of neglect towards a platform that I feel I should be maintaining better. I still believe the chainBB model is a solid concept and may revisit it as some point, but I make no promises. If and when it is revisited, I imagine the next version of it will end up using the tools that I am creating today, which will allow it to do all the things that I wish it could do today.
@jesta you are the man. @chainbb was brilliant and helped me grow drastically in the time I used it. It was much easier to search for specific content than other gateways. Call me a greedy capitalist but I will forever cherish those days when you were auto-upvoting every comment made through chainbb. It motivated me to reach out and comment on other peoples work and it was a big factor in my account growth. I look forward to seeing what else you have in store! Thanks for the refund on the forum category and thank you for providing us with ChainBB (and the source!)
You're very welcome and thanks for the kind words!
@jesta,
Too bad, but I know you have many useful projects to support the steem blockchain.
I have not fork chainbb, I will try to play around and maybe I can continue the service.
What do you recommend for a server specs to run Chainbb?
i would like to bring you witness to my w/(h) ea L/L (t/h) D https://steemit.com/g0fig/@xubrnt/ned-steemit
Ah, bummers. I know this was your baby, and you put so much into it. It's certainly sad to see it go, but you do have to set and maintain priorities in order to stay as effective as you have been. You are a productive machine!
I hope someone else sees the value in this technology and takes it upon themselves to run with it. I wasn't personally a big fan of the forum style comment threading (too many lost days in bitcointalk, I guess), but I loved supporting and promoting ChainBB because I believed in the work you were doing and thought it was an excellent example of what's possible with the STEEM blockchain beyond just Steemit.
I'm sad to see it go, but proud of you for making a tough decision.
Yeah, I poured a lot of time and effort last year into it and had some high hopes.
The learning experience alone was worth it in the end, giving this entire situation a net positive from my point of view. Actually building a social interface for Steem has really helped me evaluate what I believe a platform like Steem needs to succeed.
It's indeed a tough decision to make, but I'm pretty sure it was the right one.
I really liked chainbb.com for how it was showing vote history on each post chainbb.com/post_identifier/votes with all the details. I will miss it.
Good luck with work on further projects!
I'll try to adapt that same UI to the next version of steemdb, I really liked it as well.
follow me
I was wondering what happened! I got refunded. Thanks for all your hard work on this :(
If anyone wants to take it over let me know as I own steemitforum.com and can set it up there.
I have a team ready to pick up chainBB and I hope all existing sponsors will please contact me on steem.chat or telegram or wire.
I have chatted up jesta but did not hear back yet so far.
I would love to speak with anyone interested in working on it or sponsoring it, or working on new features design, UX, etc.
I can set up QA, tech support and do it right, but i'd like all the input that exists today to start it.
we have it running in docker, but need a lot of hosting consulting, and current user issues priorities list, known problems, etc.
Hi, @surfyogi great to hear actually. Hopefully, we can get some peeps together and make it happen. I haven't heard back from @chhantyal on anything yet. I'll let you know!
Hi, @steemitqa how can I contact you? I sent you message on Discord, I am chhantyal#1365 there.
Yes, just let me know! thx.
Sorry to see it go down @jesta. It was a very nice project, we at zappl can't wait to see what else you have planned.
Good job with it, an awesome front end. Making these decisions is never easy but I always respect people who do it up front. Kept it up 🚀
Damn, it was the best interface to steem for me... I understand your reasons though, and I really appreciate your being so clean and honest: people refunded, project open sourced, you are walking out of it as a sir, hands down.
All the best with your path!
Sorry to see it go. I talked to you about skinning it but then xmas and steemcleaners happened and I never got a chance to sit down and work on that. Chainbb is one of the best frontends the blockchain had, far better than everything came after it.
Sorry to hear this. The forum style seemed rather retro, but you were ahead of Steemit with the potential to onboard communities and share revenue with them. I hope someone with business acumen considers this because it really could be expanded, though I know you are busy with a lot of projects.