Hello Monero, then and now
What Hello Monero was
HelloMonero.com was an independent, Monero-focused news and community website active from around 2015 to 2017. It was not the official Monero site and had no formal connection to the Monero Project; it was one community member's effort to make the project easier to follow.
Its most useful and most-shared feature was coverage of the developer meetings. Monero's developers held regular public meetings on the #monero-dev IRC channel on Freenode — weekly at first, then every other Sunday — and the raw logs were long, fast-moving and full of cross-talk. Hello Monero would take each meeting and publish a set of highlights alongside the full transcript, so anyone could catch up on what was decided without sitting through an hour of IRC. Contemporary Bitcointalk posts pointed newcomers at Hello Monero's summaries as the easiest way to keep up with Monero development, and the official getmonero.org meeting-log posts of the period simply say "An overview can be found on Hello Monero" rather than duplicating the write-up.
Beyond meeting notes the site covered the Monero software releases and hard forks (e.g. the March 2016 fork), privacy news, ecosystem tools such as browser price add-ons, and community happenings.
Who ran it
The site was run and written by a Monero community member posting as aerbax. Through 2016 and early 2017 aerbax posted each new summary to r/Monero — sometimes describing having "put up a new article on the news site" — and those threads are where most of the surviving discussion of Hello Monero's articles lives today.
One of the great things about Monero is that I'll never know who keeps donating to the site to switch it to the "Hotdog Stand" theme. ;) — u/aerbax, in the r/Monero thread for the 2017-02-05 summary, 6 Feb 2017
(The footer of this reconstruction contains a small tribute to that joke. Click at your own risk.)
What happened to it
Hello Monero stopped publishing in 2017 and the domain has since lapsed; requests to the original article URLs now fail. Unusually, the Wayback Machine holds no captures of the site's pages from the years it was live — only a handful of 2020–2021 hits against a parked domain — so the original text of the articles is, as far as we can tell, gone. What survives are the URL slugs, the Reddit and Twitter posts that announced each article, and, for the meeting notes, the raw IRC logs that the Monero Project archived independently.
How this reconstruction was made
- Transcript. Taken from the getmonero.org archive of the meeting log. Bridged messages from Slack, I2P and the meeting bot are attributed to the person speaking, with the relay noted; nothing has been trimmed or reordered. Agenda anchors are additions, as is one short exchange in the Q&A, which is marked with an orange dot and noted under Sources on the article.
- Highlights. Written fresh from the transcript in the spirit of the original, since the original prose could not be recovered.
- Article index. The list of Hello Monero articles comes from the URL slugs recorded by the Wayback Machine's index for
hellomonero.com/article/*. The eight dev-meeting articles from 2016 and early 2017 match slugs from that index and carry the full IRC logs as archived by the Monero Project on getmonero.org. The meeting posts from February 2017 through October 2019 go beyond the original site's run: they carry the same official getmonero.org logs, under the naming convention Hello Monero used, but the original site had stopped publishing by then. The two non-meeting pieces (the March 2016 hard-fork explainer and the price add-ons roundup) are period-style stand-ins written for this archive, and say so at the bottom of each page. - Design. No screenshot or stylesheet of the original survives. The look here follows the getmonero.org blog of the same period, which is where the meeting logs were officially archived.
Sources
- Overview and Logs for the Dev Meeting Held on 2017-02-05 — getmonero.org
- Monero dev meeting note highlights and transcript – 2017-02-05 — r/Monero, posted by u/aerbax
- @monero on Twitter, 8 Feb 2017 — "Monero dev meeting note highlights and transcript – 2017-02-05 (by hellomonero)"
- Wayback Machine index for hellomonero.com/article/*
Corrections
If you have a saved copy, screenshot or cached version of any original Hello Monero page — or you are aerbax — the original text would be very welcome so this archive can carry the real thing instead of a reconstruction.