A “community-maintained fork” of Bitcoin.org called btcinformation.org has been launched, according to a tweet published by Twitter user David A. Harding on August 4th.

Harding, who has documented many of Bitcoin’s (BTC) features, noted that advertisements and third-party plugins found on Bitcoin.org had been removed in the “forked” version of the website. The announcements page on btcinformation.org reads, “we feel that recent events are damaging to Bitcoin.org’s neutrality.”

Launch announcement for https://t.co/JzIHLdq3Bc, a community-maintained fork of Bitcoin(dot)org with advertisements removed and third-party trackers disabled. I've already had the pleasure making some small contributions. https://t.co/dUE4ubWJZk — David A. Harding (@hrdng) August 4, 2018

“Unilateral Actions”

The announcement also states the owners and maintainers of Bitcoin.org had taken “unilateral actions” that may not have been in the best interests of the Bitcoin community. Moreover, the managers of Bitcoin.org have acted “without the consent” of the larger crypto community, the notice on btcinformation.org asserts.

Due to the controversial management of Bitcoin.org, btcinformation.org will now aim to be a “neutral, informational resource about Bitcoin and how to use Bitcoin”, the announcement notes. The “forked” website will reportedly be “fully open source,” just like Bitcoin.org.

Less than two hours after launch and the site already has its first community-contributed PR fixing up some broken links in the contributor docs (which, alas, are displayed by GitHub, so not covered by our CI testing). Thanks @BlockchainBilly! https://t.co/KVN09WloI4 pic.twitter.com/R5Mx8EqWRY — David A. Harding (@hrdng) August 4, 2018

The notice also posted a link to btcinformation.org’s source code, while pointing out the forked bitcoin website had “reverted the redesign” of bitcoin.org so that it is “visually distinct” from its previous version.

Additionally, the creators of the community-maintained website removed the events page found on Bitcoin.org, which they say was not only “additionally hard” to maintain but also listed too many “non-bitcoin related events.”

Notably, btcinformation.org does not have a link to Bitcoin Core, which bitcoin.org still does. The new website’s creators note that Bitcoin Core is an independent project so it should not be shared on a website that aims to provide neutral and objective information about the flagship cryptocurrency.

Not Using Cookies, Not Selling Ads

Translations (to languages other than English) are currently not available on new website, as its developers claim to be working to provide more accurate information in all major languages spoken throughout the world.

The website, per its announcement, uses fewer cookies and JavaScript. Furthermore, it removed Google Analytics plugins which are still found on Bitcoin.org. These were removed because the website “never intends to sell ads.”

Notably, the maintainers of btcinformation.org are currently not accepting donations from the crypto community as they’re working on a “better, distributed donations setup.” The move comes shortly after controversy surrounding one of Bitcoin.org’s owners emerged on GitHub.