Hello everyone,
Epochtalk has been in development status for many years (Millions of dollars has been sent to developers).
Rather than talking about why it's late or when it will come, I would ask why is 59 packages really needed ?
maintenance of such project would be a hell for developers and this means developers will be rent forever to keep the new forum working.
Almost every user in this forum like the classic design, they need new features. don't say that PHP is too old to run a forum, Facebook is built on top of PHP
fast and has billions of users.
development of such project using PHP wouldn't cost you a 15 000 dollars at max, and it will be super fast and secure, same for python.
So today, I will ask theymos to have the epochtalk project paused and not cancelled.
Focus on security update for the current forum, add new features.
go and search 3 expert PHP developers & 2 frontend developers for a 3k per month each for and that's a real solution.
$3k for Freelance programmers per month is a bit of a stretch. You may find that in certain countries. Not to mention, this is a large scale project, you would need someone overseeing the entire project (PMs) etc.
You're kind of defeating the purpose of your argument. You're suggesting the project can be completed quickly but then questioning why it's using 57 packages. I can almost guarantee anyone being paid $3k per month isn't going to be "reinventing the wheel" by completely writing new packages.
I do somewhat agree with your defence of PHP (it's definitely gotten better, large sites do operate on it, and scalability doesn't ALWAYS come back to the programming language... your example of Facebook is a bit offside). Facebook has spent a good portion of the last years creating Hiphop at first, and then HHVM in order to scale PHP. But we really shouldn't be comparing to PHP. PHP would have been a fine decision for this site provided it be completed well.