Client announcement for upcoming hardforks?

Is there a possibility we can get an announcement of any upcoming hardforks back in the client? I believe we had that at some stage in the past, but there was some discussion about who would trigger that message and it not being decentralised I believe. However Forum and Twitter are not that decentralised either imo.

Had to deal with a few users who figured only after a few weeks that their clients were not minting but had no clue why not and started calling support (me).

I believe current Bitcoin client has such a feature, would it perhaps possible to port that? Perhaps as an option to tick under options as not everyone may want it.

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I remember Bitcoin having a signed alert message broadcast thing.

It might be cool to add a new tab (or update the Peers tab) in the Debug window of the application that shows the chain the other nodes are following. If you start to see higher version number nodes on a different chain that might be a good sign that you’re out-of-date and we could add a UI warning.

Any way… the chain tracking and alerting is a feature I was day-dreaming about but seems like it might be useful in this case.

I think it is, there is value for the network to keep those people minting continuously even during upgrades and keep the network secure. A signed alert message broadcast might be cheaper to implement though.

there is such thing as signed alerts, we’ve actually used it in the past for previous forks, but this time we didn’t publish new alert. some people think that mere using alerts would remind people that there’s central force running things and it’s kinda shameful in peercoin and pos in general. we know the facts, power of this centralisation is to be able to publish alerts, but nobody reads.

Then perhaps just have a notification that it is recommended to read the forum due to proposed changes. With a public notification in the forum and twitter, opposing people can reply and give their opinion in such thread. With that everyone can decide for themselves whether they want to join the fork or not. But at least it is known that something may happen soon and everyone can chose which way they want to benefit.

I believe setting a higher bar for staking contributors to find the relevant communication is also some form of censorship or manipulation. A small group might benefit as we would loose some staking contributors during a fork as thet ‘won’t know’ about the upgrade. This won’t benefit the network as a whole.

So I think I know who those people are who are saying that they think there is a central force running things. It is like everything democratic, there will always be lobbyists either way. I believe that is fine as long as you can hear both sides of the stories and can find the nuances if you want to.

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