Community, we have not formally met before but that is not important right now. I am a part of the mysterious "dev team" people often talk about on the forum and I feel obliged to post an update on current situations coupled with a retort to some of the hooligans running loose. First and foremost, progress is being made. We do not work on the server live, everything we do is tested extensively before it even sees an internet enabled device and then further scrutinized on a locked down testing server before being pushed into the live environment. Typically development of any feature can take up to a month from finishing up the code to release because of this process. This is inconvenient we understand but we are also the only market which has not been hacked yet for this reason and you can be sure people would be far more upset with us if we were negligent in our duties to protect the users. Secondly, Defcon is not dead. Like me and the others he is hard at work and typically when one announcement is made, it is followed by a storm of further questions and wild theories which waste valuable time. This perhaps answers why the louder some people kick and cry for us to post, the less we actually do. When developing a project in the circumstances of Silk Road, we are not merely fixing bugs or dealing with trivial usability problems. Silk Road has a team well beyond the competence of even many professional cohorts that work for three letter agencies and we all have something in common: pushing limits. The problems we face are not something a quick line of code will fix but require changes in the actual Tor network itself and until the next generation of hidden services are released we are having to make do. The fact of the situation is nobody has ever done what we are doing and so we must tread carefully into the unknown. Our recent contributions are for example feeding back information to the right people when we are attacked so such issues can be addressed not only by us but by Tor at large. Anyone who remembers the DDOS not so long ago may find there is odd timing that shortly after this researchers were tipped off to what is now known as the "Sniper attack" - now fixed at a network level so all may benefit on a safer network. Some users have also taken the liberty to publicly complain of what they deem to be slow progress, then making suggestions such as "Fix the captcha". If you want to know the problems of Silk Road, it is nothing to do with the source code of the site actually, almost all the team work on various layer 3 and 4 (TCP/UDP/SCTP/IPv4) matters and another contingent work on various application layer problems. The sentiment we have poorly coded SR is based on perception only, Silk Road could better be described as a nuclear bunker when it comes to security and stability - it is the network itself which is crumbling (vendors can see this first hand by comparing performance between the public URL and vendor URL). I have noticed there are others trying to rally an exodus of Silk Road too and move to the other markets as a form of protest. Those calling for such things please do not waste your breath here and just leave instead because frankly I do not care and neither do the management. You have put hope into other markets before, DPR2 made a high profile attack on Tor Market to prove how foolish some of your assumptions are and that was only a speck of effort from a single person in our team so imagine what the full force of our security detail could accomplish. If you want to get into the business of illegal markets on Tor, you have to be prepared for full scale cyberwarfare or you are not going to be able to protect your user base. Now that part is over, a quick update. The support system has been rolled out already although we haven't patched it up yet to sync with your accounts. Moderators and market staff already have access to this support system and are working through your tickets as we speak, you will receive their responses as soon as the dev team green light the live patch. This means the moment we do go live, every support ticket will be answered and there will be little or no backlog anymore. As above, this will be rapidly worked through as soon as we patch up the system to the live server. Same story different system. Once the release is pushed, everything will be running smoothly without a problem and we won't have this issue again. We are aware of this and working on a solution now. I was asked not to reference specific times or days but just be patient as it won't be long. One of the others will follow this post up with more information soon but until then - everyone calm the fuck down and breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth people.