I have just started doing some Transifex translation for an altcoin forked from Bitcoin 9.  Here are some challenges and observations with a focus on the Qt application:

1 - The string resources can be categorized into four groups for the purposes of the following:
1.1 - Plain literal strings.
1.2 - Strings with embedded markup (e.g. ...
1.3 - Strings with embedded C style printf formatting directives (prefixed with %).
1.4 - Strings with embedded alt key accelerator code flags (indicated by &).

2 - This presents the following challenges to translators:
2.1 - Longer translated strings may unknowingly end up being truncated in the UI - addressed by testing, but makes UI changes and redesign delicate with testing x N languages required.
2.2 - Translators mush be aware to some degree of the manner in which the various formatting directives are used i.e. translators must to some small degree be either coders or trained software translators.  Casual translators tend to mess things up in a number of different ways.
2.3 - I don't believe it's appropriate to put formatting directives into string resources.  If the developer wishes to change a format, is he/she to make the change to every separate language resource ?  This is a maintenance nightmare.  This is too tightly coupled a connection between the core code and the language resources.  imho the solution is to split such string resources into segments without formatting directives and keep latter in the source code.
2.4 - Regarding alt key accelerator codes e.g. O&ptions will display with an underscore under the p [after Alt is pressed] to indicate that the menu option / dialog control can be invoked by the keyboard accelerator Alt-p, with p chosen rather than o because Alt-o is presumably already taken for an adjacent menu option / dialog control having concurrent run-time focus.  Note that you can have clashes across different menus / dialogs because they don’t both have focus at the same time. This point is quite challenging for translators because not knowing the complete context of where each specific string resource is used (possibly multiple uses) it is difficult to avoid the possibility of multiple translated strings resulting in accelerator code clashes.  There is a need therefore for some documentation that groups string resources used as menu/dialog labels so that translators can more easily select their alt key accelerator characters to best effect and avoiding clashes.

I have not yet looked to see if these same issues exist with the latest Bitcoin version, but I can imagine that with more important priorities elsewhere, not much has changed from 9 -> 11/12.  I would be more than happy to contribute towards working out and implementing a solution to some of these issues.  But being relatively new to looking under the bonnet of the Bitcoin code base (all be it via a forked altcoin) I thought it best to place these observations here to start with.

Apologies if I'm stepping on anyone's toes, but I think you guys have pretty thick skin by now.

Henry

So guys, what's the conclusion about bitlend.io - scam, legit or in the grey zone and worth benefit of doubt until things start going wrong ?

Spread on Bittrex opened out to 24%.  Sellers not crowding into the gap yet ...

I was running the social wallet beta for the last couple of weeks and the expected reward kept moving further out in time, eventually over 20 days.  I just fired up the QT style traditional wallet (latest version 1.3.1.2) and that is telling me that I'm expected to earn a reward once per day, which is more in line with what I estimated based on the useful explanations of the PoSV mechanism here.  So the question is are we aware that the social wallet is messed up, or was it something I did wrong ?

Guys - I'm sorry but I just endured watched one of the IOCoin videos voiced by the most boring and unenthusiastic individual I have ever heard.  As a recovered geek who now understands marketing, please take it from me that the marketing collateral associated with your coin is VASTLY more important than any wiz bang feature.  At least make an effort and get someone who can at least sound positive, possibly with a more internationally acceptable accent.  Flame me if you wish but can you deny I speak the truth?  I spotted IOCoin on BITTREX, mainly because of the increasing price with a tight spread.  I installed the wallet and was dead set on buying some.  Some snazzy graphics impressed a little, but then I found the videos - FAIL.  Please go get your vids re-voiced.  This is easy and cheap to do.  Just get hold of a undergrad drama student that can do a half decent job of sounding upbeat.  For as long as your public image sounds regional, boring and utterly devoid of enthusiasm you're going to have a tough job convincing anyone this is anything other than a midlands student lark cooked up over a few pints.  You may be respectable eminent fantastic people, but impressions count.

And the fact there isn't even a web site, only a neutral forum thread doesn't look good either.  If there is one, tell coinmarketcap.com.

It seems the expected stake time keeps increasing.  A couple of weeks ago my wallet was showing 5 days and now it's up to 15.  Does this reflect the fact that more people are running their wallets and staking, perhaps being back at their desks from vacation ?  If so the expected stake time is possibly a good indication of fluctuations in the number of active staking users.  Thoughts

Does the Genesis UI actually display the complete range of coins that Genesis has setup for mining behind the scenes ? Or is Genesis actually mining across a larger selection of coins for its auto multipool ?  I would be good if it was because the real power of Genesis IMHO is the set and forget auto mining feature.  As a follow up question, which exchanges does Genesis use for trading mined coins into the required payout coins ?

The Vacation / Holiday effect

Much has been written on the swoon in Bitcoin and alt prices, but much of that writing is almost by definition by people not taking their summer breaks as seriously as many people do.  So there has been poor news flow, reduced transaction rates / growth, alts not progressing their road maps, etc.  I personally think it inevitable that once our peers get back to their desks, interest will pick up, road maps will re-engage, and we'll see some more excitement in this space.  One of my personal tips right now is Reddcoin for the simple reason that its price will no longer be murdered by the types of miners that sell immediately, its road map for the remainder of the year should generate more interest, and the mere fact that the Genesis multipool is paying out optionally in RDD will provide some support for the price also (probably a small effect, but in the right direction).  If anyone else agrees with me, set phasers to "RDD(Auto)" and we'll all support the price acting together.

Also my personal vote of approval and appreciation goes to the Genesis team.  You'll have seen my recent comments, and whilst I'm sure you had these matters in hand already, it's always great to look like you are responding to comments and criticisms in a timely manner.  Well done.  I may even expand my hash power soon as my real vote of approval.  Is there a current promo code -come on - I said nice things ;-)

OK that's great.  So this is in effect "Auto(RDD)" in their UI terms.  So why hasn't Genesis updated their UI to reflect this and make the option clear to customers.  It was well known in advance when the change over day (block number actually) would be.  And the back end work to support this must have been much more complex than the UI update.  So this just proves my point that Genesis are not keeping up with events to best effect.  I guess it's possible they have a UI guy and a back end guy and there were availability issues for part time or multi-role staff.  Or they decided to roll this into other UI updates upcoming.  At the very least it would be nice to be told.  I may have continued on RDD because the price is pretty bombed out right now (due to Northern Hemisphere summer vacation time imho - for Bitcoin too) and I believe it should run up again when the Redd team get going with their road map again.

I'm sorry if that sounds like a negative whinge, but these details matter.

So that's a great example of Genesis not staying current.  ReddCoin is no longer mine-able having moved to its Proof of Stake phase.  AuroraCoin seems to have flopped as has LottoCoin.  So really the effective choice/value comes down to Lite/Doge/Feather/Black/Mega, with payout in Bit/Dark.  Personally I would like a larger effective choice than five.

And on the sysadmin work front, the real complexity jump is going from one to multiple, unless there are horrendous manual processes hidden behind the scenes.  Certainly the variability of daily payout time and prior comments here about a manual sign-off process would suggest that the current Genesis infrastructure may not be operationally scalable in the multi-coin dimension in quite that same way that Bittrex seems to be.  And in saying that I'm not trivializing the difference between exchange and mining operations, but I hope you take my point to some degree.  Some of the issues in supporting multiple coins are common to both.

It seems to me that Genesis is not moving with the market.  We see exchanges like Bittrex supporting almost 200 alt coins, coinmarketcap listing over 450 alt coins and although I didn't get the exact stats, it seems to be that Scrypt/Keccak/X11 coins outnumber SHA-256 coins.  I'm not advocating Genesis taking a "collector mentality" by trying to support most coins, but it would certainly be to their and our advantage to offer a larger selection, perhaps selected on market cap or some other metric of perceived relevance.  Having a vote once a month for one new coin, while hundreds come and go, is hardly tenable other than as an early stage "proof of concept".  Genesis clearly has the infrastructure to support multiple coins, so surely adding new ones is just a modicum of sysadmin work ?  Clearly the mining allocation GUI (a cute gimmick - we can all type numbers if we need to) is not scalable to larger numbers of coins, but that's hardly rocket science to fix.

Genesis broke on the scene with some good innovations.  Now they're getting stale.

Just to confirm the above procedure worked - the Reddcoin wallet resynced with zero balance, I closed the app, copied by backup copy of wallet.dat into "appdata"/Reddcoin, restarted the app, and all back to normal.  So to conform the error was the locally cached block chain data consistency or the indexing thereof, so restarting from scratch then overlaying your original wallet.dat file fixes everything.

But this highlights the point that a modicum of technical ability is still needed to work with local wallets.  We really need secure hosted wallets like a BlockChain equivalent for any alt coin to really cross over into the mainstream.  The world already moved from C: to Cloud anyway, so how will all the alts do this.  Forking QT is not the answer.

I had the exact same problem.  The App does not need to be reinstalled, although taking advantage of the opportunity to upgrade to the latest 1.3.1 from www.redcoin.com is good practice.  The error is something associates with the block chain state cached locally.  As per the above, delete everything in the Reddcoin application data folder (I deleted the blocks, chainstate, database and txleveldb folders) but leave wallet.dat (with a safe copy elsewhere just in case).  Restart the wallet application and it comes up with your coins shown as unconfirmed and starts syncing with the network, as mine currently is.  I'm assuming that it will resync and everything go back to normal.  I'll report back if there are any more problems, but otherwise please assume this fix worked fine.

RestartCoin ?

What about offering support for SHA-3 coins that are currently GPU only with no ASIC support yet.  MaxCoin would be an obvious example.  There's a cudaminer version with SHA-3 / Keccak support.  It flies on a decent GPU rig.

Other things remaining equal, that leaves you 184 days of pure profit for your one year contract.  You try getting anything remotely close to that on a bank deposit.  That's hardly a scam in my book !!!

Working now on Azure, 5 connections so far.  The endpoints query was a red herring - sorry !

Like instacash says, just leave it running with the config with the extra addnodes, and be patient.

Do you have connections > 0 ?

Azure users with zero connections - I think it's something to do with setting up endpoints in the Azure management portal.  By default only port 22 (ssh) is allowed through.  Any ideas ?