Filecoin's mainnet is about to be launched, which means that Filecoin will enter a new stage of development. Many technical ideas and incentive measures will be implemented.

In the past few months, Filecoin has made significant progress in revising its specifications and customizing its website. There have been countless updates, making the specifications more accurate by more than six times, achieving an impressive 85% completeness score, and many other details are still in progress. The contributions and consultations on the specifications have also improved significantly due to new workflows, status tagging, searching, and more.

The Spec website has gone through several rounds of design, implementation, and deployment to integrate all the features needed to create an excellent platform for Filecoin developers, implementers, researchers, and ecosystem developers. The complexity of updating the specifications has been reduced, structured dependency management has been applied, functionality to ensure the consistency of the entire specification has been added, and support for new tools has been increased.

The updated Filecoin specification contribution workflow makes it easier to update the specifications by making "one-touch" edits in markdown files. The backend mechanism takes care of the rest of the work and automatically updates the Table of Contents (ToC) and document structure. Simple instructions can be found in the repo README file for contributing to the specifications.

The updated site has notable features in the following categories: tools and syntax, graphs and code blocks, and file hierarchy. It seamlessly controls dependencies using npm and Go modules, provides seamless mathematical support through katex, introduces new markdown rules to ensure consistency, and performs tests in continuous integration. The integration of Mermaid, Dot, and the Hugo server for development and content editing is excellent for handling pipelines. Symbolic shortcodes can be used to reference code blocks in the specifications, enabling the correct referencing even if the code library itself is modified.

File hierarchy features include extracting section numbering from the ToC for automatic updates after section restructuring, deep linking integration, and a stable single-page rendering that reflects the structure in the ToC. Additionally, the website has undergone a redesign.

In terms of content, significant efforts have been made to update the protocol explanations. The Filecoin protocol specification is a substantial document, and if printed, it would be a textbook of about 400 pages. The specification is unrelated to any specific implementations, meaning it describes the algorithms and protocol interactions required for the network to function without delving into implementation details. The specification provides all the necessary details for developers to implement Filecoin in any language, with references to the Lotus implementation only when needed.

During the three-month SpecProject journey, over 300 GitHub issues were opened and over 200 PRs were merged. Currently, the specification site is 84% updated. To track the official progress and the "health" of the site and protocol, three excellent tools have been combined:

- A dashboard that displays the status of each section of the specification on a scope ranging from "incorrect" to "stable." The frontend material attributes in the specmarkdown file are integrated to automatically populate these values into the dashboard without any additional actions. The dashboard is also generated and updated from the ToC, eliminating the need to edit individual files.- An "audit complete" indicator as a separate column in the dashboard to show if specific components of the protocol have been audited. If there are audit reports, there are links to the report (or a previous list of reports) and the date of the audit.- A progress bar summarizing the status of the entire specification.

After several rounds of testing and two impressive space races, the protocol has been fine-tuned and is ready to be launched. From now on, changes to the protocol will be made through Filecoin Improvement Proposals (FIPs). The proposed changes to the protocol must go through a clearly defined process, which is detailed in the FIP repository. In most cases, FIPs will require updates to the protocol specification, so one of the ongoing tasks includes seamlessly integrating FilecoinSpec with the FIP process.

Filecoin also integrates specification version control to create a TimeMachine for the specification. Additionally, tools are being integrated to extract data from remote sources via API proxies. This integration will allow for seamless integration with FIPs and expand the dashboard to include the status of "consistency testing."

Filecoin welcomes input from developers, researchers, node operators, and users. Contributions to the specifications, feedback on the website and specification update process, as well as ideas for improving the user experience, are greatly appreciated.

The protocol and its specifications have made significant progress in the two space races and have been upgraded. However, more effort is needed to turn all the specification dashboard units blue. The plan is to have 90% reliable content in the next few weeks and 100% stable content in the coming months.