The Grand Trunk has relocated to http://grandmpdsznzevvs.onion/ for the foreseeable future.
Major Changes
The market no longer requires users to be logged in while to view the listings or user profiles.
The server capacity has been doubled as the market moves towards completion.
The server is on the real bitcoin network, if anyone is brave enough to send funds, they will be picked up by an wallet notify event, and automatically credited to your account.
Categories are now accurate.
The url structure has been overhauled to make the site easier to share.
The login is now case insensitive.
How orders work
When a user places an order, they may cancel it up until the time that the vendor acts on the order.
Once in shipping 17 days are allocated to the order before auto finalization occurs.
With five days remaining on the order the user may contest the order and place it into the resolution center.
Once in the resolution center he or the vendor may propose either an extension or refund. If neither party can come to an agreement, the order goes to arbitration where it is reviewed by a panel of moderators and the most fair solution is picked by consensus.
Technical details
Withdrawals are not instant, they instead are put in a batch job queue where they sit until funds have been released from the cold wallet.
The server is split into 5 components to make sure its exceptionally robust, with high throughput and availability. It runs, a web server, a sql datastore, a memcached server, a wallet tracking server and batch job runner.
The server is not running php, or nginx instead it has custom asset pipeline optimized for tor, meaning that pages will load significantly faster while under load than other markets. And not only that but once loaded, the page will be immediately available without having to wait for images.
Markdown is supported for vendor descriptions and item descriptions.
Search looks at users that are currently vendors, listings, or categories for a partial match of the term that you typed.
On a user log in, they have 20 attempts at their password before they are locked out for 1 day.
Users have a username which they log in with and an alias which can be changed, and is seen by everyone. (If a vendor changes his alias, he still retains all of his listing, old stats and orders. Changing alias does not allow you to flee from the community, just allows you to hide your username)
And many more smaller updates.
I am really excited to share this progress with the community at large. Currently a forum is in the works, and a visual overhaul is also slated.
As always I am looking for feedback, and would like to integrate your comments or concerns into the development process.
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