It’s been a really busy start to the year with the focus being on some major back end development work, as well as rolling out the new website design and brand identity. We’ve moved away from the old basic WordPress template that was originally used and now have a bespoke design created using Vue.js. We’re really pleased with the outcome and the feedback from the community has been very positive. We received lots of great feedback on how to further improve the site, and as always we listened and implemented it where possible. If you’ve not yet taken a look please head over to jsecoin.com and feel free to let us know what you think.
Some major development updates
Opt-in system
We’ve always believed in running an ethical and transparent publisher mining system, and definitely feel that we have led the way with this from the start with the inclusion of the privacy notice on all sites running the JSEcoin miner. The emergence of a number of hidden Monero miners has created a large amount of negativity towards browser mining and has led to issues with some ad-block and anti-virus companies blocking JSEcoin mining from running. We have decided to further increase our transparency by trialling JSEcoin publisher mining as an opt-in system. We’ve thought long and hard about this and believe that the positives outweigh the negatives and will simply increase the chance of mainstream adoption and acceptance of browser mining as a method of website monetization. For a full outline of our plans and arguments for and against this system please head over to our recent blog post “Moving to an opt-in system” @ https://jsecoin.com/blog/development/moving-to-an-opt-in-system
The system will go live during the scheduled maintenance window detailed below. We will be doubling publisher rewards for the seven day test window. This gives publishers a chance to test the new system and provide feedback while mitigating risk to earnings.
Data storage upgrade
Towards the end of last year we had a couple of issues with Google’s Firebase DB. This caused us a few problems and was completely out of our control, so we’ve developed a new system that is much more suited to our needs and we’re much more in control of should there ever be any issues. The P2P communications platform is now live as well to provide distributed data across the JSE network. The backend system has been given a complete overhaul in preparation for greater load as we scale and open-sourcing the code base.
VPN/TOR/PROXY restrictions
We’re trying to make JSEcoin fair and accessible for all. Unfortunately a number of users have been using a variety of methods to try and cheat the system and gain an unfair advantage. As part of our ongoing development to combat fraud and unfair practice we have now restricted users from using VPN’s or Tor to run the self mining. Fraud prevention is an ongoing development and certainly not something we will “solve” once and for all. We see it more as a cat and mouse game where the threat is constantly evolving and it’s our job to try and get one step ahead. We’ve been playing catch up since launch but I think we are starting to get there now. Preventing all kinds of malicious attacks on the system is one of the core things that our team needs to do well to add value to this project. It’s hard to get right and that should stand us in good stead for when we start seeing more competitors in the space.
Site translations
We’ve previously offered this up to the community to help get the site translated into a number of key languages, but it is a very onerous task and was going to be very difficult to get the translated sites up and running in the desired timeframe. What we’ve decided to do is use Google’s API to perform the translation, and we’re happy with the result. We understand that there will be some errors, and so if you’d like to improve your native language you can earn JSE for being an editor and modifying the JSON file directly. Simply email team@jsecoin.com for access to the file make corrections and send it back to us.
Scheduled Maintenance
Starting Friday Morning at 8am UTC we will be rolling out all these updates. It’s going to be the biggest upgrade to the system so far this year and there are likely to be a few teething problems. In order to push these changes through we will need to shut the system down for at least three hours from 08:00 UTC Friday 2nd March 2018. During this time the platform will not be available. We will be moving a lot of data and restarting the blockchain from a new genesis block. All account balances, transaction history etc will be carried forwards. Website publishers running the script will not need to take any action although there will be a 3 hr~ gap in earnings. This will be offset by 7 days of double rewards for publishers while we test the new opt-in system. Self-miners will need to log back in and restart the mining when the system comes back online. There may be minor disruption for up to 24 hours following this whilst any issues are ironed out. We apologies for this inconvenience, however it is essential upgrade work.
We’re looking for your help
We’ve recently added a few small jobs to the odd jobs page and this will be updated regularly, so please head over to Small Jobs to see if there is anything you can help out with and earn yourself some extra JSE.