Hi Alison,
Just to clarify, the feedback I received was that "Onion Service" is generally the preferred term; however "Onion site" could be used as a sub-class of "Onion Service" to refer exclusively to websites. Due to this, the user manual[1] has been changed to use the term "Onion Service".
That said, we are still very inconsistent about how we use these terms in many other places.
[1]: https://tb-manual.torproject.org/linux/en-US/
Alison Macrina:
Hi all,
Colin (phoul) and I started working on the support team docs a few weeks ago, and it brought to our attention just how much onion sites/onion services/hidden services are still being used interchangeably. Since this is confusing, we checked in with folks about which one is preferred, and onion sites seems to be the clear favorite. However, internally and on Twitter, I still see us using onion services (and worse, hidden services).
So, I want to propose that we choose onion sites or onion services once and for all (I'm in favor of the former because most users have no idea what is meant by "services"; it sounds too vague). Then, whenever we see somewhere on torproject.org or any of our documentation or whatever that still reads hidden services or onion services, that we kill it with fire.
Thanks for reading,
Alison