Hi All,

As onion (hidden) service operators, what features would you like to see in release 0.2.8?

I want to find out what will help onion service operators the most.

I think I might be able to finish Rendezvous Single Onion Services, or help finish Rendezvous Handoff, but not both.

A Rendezvous Single Onion Service (RSOS) is an onion service that connects directly to the introduction and rendezvous points.

For services that don't need to hide their location, it provides better connection latency, and likely better throughput.

(And a large RSOS puts less load on the Tor network than a large HS.)

See proposal #260 for more information: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/260-rend-single-onion.txt

And for the remaining tasks: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17178#childtickets

Rendezvous Handoff allows Hidden Services and Rendezvous Single Onion Services to perform the introduction in one tor process, and then handoff the rendezvous to a separate tor process. This allows services to scale beyond the number of rendezvous connections (clients) that a single tor process can handle. We suspect that's about 100 at this point.

See proposal #255 for more information: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/255-hs-load-balancing.txt

And for the draft implementation: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17254

And the issue it's trying to solve: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/8902

Some personal background:

I have about a week to a month of development time left before I have to start some other work.

At this point, it's unclear whether I will be working on Tor or not.

So I'd like to maximise the impact of my remaining Tor development time.

It would be great if you could help me work out how to do that!

Thanks

Tim