Well, the interesting news is that simply adding the lines to the sources, recompiling, wiping the blockchain, etc etc .. Doesn't work. So there must be another trick to it .. I suspected there might be, but I don't know enough about it to guess. Will do some more debugging .. the code itself seems simple enough .. but if there is supposed to be a node in the network that does something special, and its down or not functioning correctly .. I cannot compensate for this.

Found out the same on my end also. It's definitely a learning experience. I looked at a number of other coins source code for clues and one thing is pretty clear, this one is really out of date. As long as Cryptsy is trading them and people are buying them all up I'll keep my pool going.

Where are the developers starcoin? what they are doing and whether they are alive in the society?
Maybe it's time to organize a new community ..

I don't think it's forked ("screwed up"). Do you have the correct addnodes in your config?

You should leave it open for a few hours. Maybe it will start synching completely then.

Well, most of the time this works just fine. The fact StarCoin isn't really popular anymore, or not as popular as it was before, makes this harder I think.

I can't check my config file now, as I'm not home. I will later on, please contact me for a reminder!

Yes, you can. I did it before. 

Please check this post: https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/259012.msg4049197;topicseen#msg4049197

The user "Contestest" explains how to do it easily. It worked for me .

just like the coin for the name

Theoretically, you can download a 'bootstrap' file which will get you started, but generally this is frowned upon because you are trusting a single authority on the integrity of that file, whereas the network is, by design, trusted to itself.

It's something I'd quite like to do for StarCoin, but the method for doing it seems a little vague.

What I can say, is that only this week I have done a complete blockchain sync for StarCoin over a 20Mbit connection in about a day .. obviously not watching it download, that gets tiresome very quickly - but it does sync up correctly. You will see the message 'Checkpoint is old' - this is ok, but there are steps in process to rectify this, and get a new wallet published. As always, patience is key

I also tried solo mining against the above wallet successfully, and have mined a small quantity of coins this way. Setup is a bit complicated, but there are guides online if you search. Alternatively there is a good stable pool running at starcoin.mining.sexy which you can use.

I'm giving up on the coin - wallet just stop synching....

onto another coin - over and out.