Better Forks?

[uaktags]

Hey guys, obviously things have continued to get stale, but a great thank you goes out to @joeuhren and @TheHolyRoger for your community engagement, issue handling, and great code additions. While I'm basically more around just trying to help answer issues, I have not spent much time with new code additions, as I work more in Solana projects these days, and the forks have (hopefully) gotten a little better over time.

So I'm wondering if there's any forks out there that people are finding themselves using that have not yet created a PR to merge back with us. I know some forks like ciquiduis have come and gone, and they didn't do proper forks to track, but if someone can list out some of their favorite forks, i'd love to start going through and creating proper PRs to merge with.

I know there's been desires for things like Masternodes (properly implemented), better error management for different transaction types, and I'm certain that the RPC standards have probably had a few new features added that we could start looking into. Let me know, or if you're a Fork manager, please create a PR yourself and let us review! For me, personally, i'd love to use a 2 tier database system where historical data can be thrown into a db like Postgres or Mysql, and then the "fresh" data can be mongo. There are tools out there that do a pretty decent job of converting blockchain leveldb data from coind to SQL code, which would be great for those that need to sync ALOT of data up quickly, and having historical relational data is always fun (plus its less frequently accessed, so might as well get it onto a slower/less used node).

As always, thank you everyone for your continued commitment into Iquidus' Explorer, it's definitely been a fun journey working with the community these past few years.

[joeuhren]

Maybe not a proper fork as I cloned it years ago from ciquidus, but feel free to pull over any code from my eiquidus fork, although you've got a mountain to climb if you want to catch up to where I'm at in terms of fixes and features.

I'm a little over 300 commits ahead of this repo and don't have time to submit them all myself. I've rewritten (and hopefully improved) a large portion of the codebase, so unfortunately that will likely make it more difficult to cherry-pick certain features without aligning with the new settings structure for example. I've been at this since 2019 so there's too many features and updates to list, but I'll try:

• mobile support
• masternode support
• ssl/tls support
• sass support
• platform independent optimizations (run the explorer on linux, windows or macos and maybe others if they are similar to linux)
• PM2 and forever are essentially built-in
• backup/restore mongo database scripts
• script to update the explorer code from github, update out-of-date dependencies and auto-restart the explorer so new changes take effect immediately (uses PM2s zero-downtime reload option if the explorer has 2 or more cores and running via PM2)
• custom css and javascript files to add your own custom changes without affecting the ability to receive updates from the update script
• network difficulty and hashrate charts
• upgraded to bootstrap v5.x
• zk-snarks support
• bitcoin P2PK support (I added a PR for iquidus here over a year ago)
• vastly improved markets with support for multiple trading pairs per exchange, exchange icons, working charts, etc.
• footer links are no longer hardcoded to a handful of services and you can add as many as you want with custom img or fontawesome icons
• decode and show OP_RETURN values for blockchains that use that feature to store data
• hundreds if not thousands of other configurable option such as customizing bootstrap colors, changing the coin api cmds without needing to update the source code, new side-menu, almost an overwhelming amount of little tweakable options
• fixed every conceivable security hole
• 99% of the bugs or shortcomings that still exist in this repo have been fixed

If there's somehow a "better" iqudius fork out there, I'd love to hear about it. Next big features to add will be I18N support with the ability to change languages on-the-fly and a method of detecting and handling orphaned blocks which I haven't seen done in any open source explorer that I've looked at.

It sounds like you have some great ideas for new explorer features. I'd love to collaborate more in the future if you are able to take a break from the Solana work. I've got pages and pages of detailed notes on improvements and other features I'd love to see in an open explorer, but can only do so much with the limited time I have working on my own.