We know you are enjoying the super-advanced functionality made available at the brand new ValuePickr Investing Forums 
Credit for the brand new ValuePickr site is entirely due to the untiring efforts of our 2 Heroes – Vimal Mathews (@vml) and Pratyush Mittal (@pratyushmittal ) – both VP Members, and technology wizards.
5 years back in 2010, ValuePickr site was implemented on a Plone CMS (Python), Ploneboard message board with an underlying Zope Database by Shibin (@shibin) a friend of Suhas (@suhas), VP Member and the brain behind the VP Stock Screener (first in India) prototype which had wowed one & everyone in 2009. The design was simple, elegant and robust for the requirements we had envisaged back then – for collaborative research among few dedicated folks.
Suhas’s initial work, and then Shibin’s passionate efforts made sure that - what was a hobby concept in 2009 - was delivered on the ground successfully within a year in 2010. There was no regular updates/maintenance possible from 2011 onwards (mostly naivety) but the robust implementation (and a whole lot of goodwill, must say) made sure VP survived somehow, for almost 5 years. It had served us very well till 2012 but with huge surging traffic and user-base in 2013, we quickly realised we needed a) a more scalable platform and b) more advanced collaborative functionality.
And then we ran into some big stumbling blocks. For historical reasons (our fault) code documentation was non-existent. The Zope Database was a blackbox – Ploneboard discussion threads were encrypted & stored with proprietary algos – that made seamless migration of the rich history/educative base of VP forum discussions – extremely difficult, if not impossible. Shibin had moved on to other things, got deep in his freelance work, and clearly couldn’t help us crack the issues. Many others tried their hands in the last couple of years, and gave up. Pratyush himself a python expert of some repute was also stumbling. Enter Vimal Mathews (joined VP in early 2014) a technology wizard (and doing his PHD) who responded to our appeal.
Vimal tinkered around for some time and wrote huge number of automated scripts that did the job. All forum discussions stored by the Plone message board could finally be completely migrated, at will. Pratyush, himself no slouch at coding – was amazed and acknowledged Vimal’s feat as unimaginable - pure brilliant technical wizardry!!
With the show-stopper issue out of the way, Pratyush then took on himself the tough task of implementing for us the new discussion forum with all the advanced functionality we desired – automatic notifications, a trust system for encouraging high quality contributions and flagging abuse, image insertions, seamless access from and sync across most type of mobile devices (handsets & tabs), laptops and desktops, and much more. His passion ensured we could also seamlessly integrate the Discussion forum with the individual rights-based collaborative create-edit-review-publish workflows for Stock Story, Management Q&A, and other structured content (another must-have key collaboration functionality) at ValuePickr Research.
One can’t emphasise their self-less, voluntary contribution enough – their GIFT to our very-deserving, brilliant ValuePickr Community – by publicly acknowledging what a labour of love this has been - the passion, technical smarts, and hard work by these two wizards - that they overcame high ODDS to deliver a modern collaborative platform, in tune with our needs, today!!
Go ahead, and enjoy! Don’t forget to congratulate our Heroes!
The new forum may need some getting used to. Spend some time familiarising yourself and you should get hooked, just like we are.
Look forward to your feedback. Happy collaborating!
to every member as well as seniors.
Way to go guys.