[tor-bugs] #3592 [Website]: lack of web forums

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#3592: lack of web forums
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    Reporter:  cypherpunks  |       Owner:  phobos  
        Type:  defect       |      Status:  reopened
    Priority:  normal       |   Milestone:          
   Component:  Website      |     Version:          
  Resolution:               |    Keywords:          
      Parent:               |      Points:          
Actualpoints:               |  
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Comment(by atagar):

 > We should consider giving it a more official sounding domain name, if we
 want it to have a chance of succeeding. Say, forum.torproject.org...

 Agreed, making a real go of this will give it the best shot at succeeding.
 It seems like there's a couple routes we could take...

 - Clearly label this as an experimental, unofficial forum to just test the
 waters. From earlier discussions this is what I thought that we were going
 for, in which case the focus is more on a low setup effort to simply test
 the theory of "build it and they will come". They probably won't.

 - Invest some effort into an official forum, hopefully with a tpo vm, url,
 and with Jeremy helping to make it look nice.

 I'm all for the second option - I just threw up forum.atagar.com to get
 the ball rolling and, besides the topic breakdown, there's nothing there
 that's worth keeping.

 After looking around a bit I'm actually kinda in favor of us sticking with
 phpbb in either case. Yes, it's php. Yes, it's security track record is
 miserable. But it seems to be the most mature open source option out there
 and after a few black eyes its developers are, at the very least, making
 an effort to do better. If Jake or others have ideas for sandboxing then
 it would be great to get their input.

 On the plus side, going with phpbb means that it will be far easier to
 find documentation, addons, and themes to make it function and act the way
 we want (pretty example: http://www.spacetrace.com/forum/). It would be
 great if we could somehow make use of the blog.torproject.org styling...
 Jeremy: do you have any experience or interest in phpbb theming? :)

 If we go with this then I'd like for us to make a tor-forum@ list that's
 attached to a m2f instance (http://mail2forum.com/). For all practical
 purposes this would make it another tor-talk@ list that happens to have a
 forum frontend too, making it easier to manage (yea, I prefer email lists
 over forums too). In the future we might be able to merge it with tor-
 talk@, but we should initially keep them separate to see what sort of
 audience and spam it gets.

 > Unless someone can commit to replying to support requests on the forum,
 we should not make the forum an official support channel. I have enough
 support channels to keep track of as it is.

 Ok, now I'm a little confused. I thought that this support channel would
 be a replacement for blog comments, and a community support channel that's
 like tor-talk@ but more visible. From what I understand rt.tpo and tor-
 support@ are closed channels for help via dedicated support people.

 Thoughts?

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3592#comment:11>
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The Tor Project: anonymity online