[tor-talk] General questions about Tor proxy

[Patrick Schleizer]

The discussion "Tor needs a forum" is old.

I see two problems on that topic.

1) Tor has no competition

("In the NSA's "Tor Stinks" presentation, they call Tor "the king of
high-secure [sic] low-latency Internet anonymity" with "no contenders
for the throne in waiting" [you find that quote on search engines])

Let's just say necessity is the mother of invention.

2) Perfect is the enemy of good

The people in charge of the decision on finally getting a forum
installed on torproject.org have such high demands for what
quality/features the forum must have... So their perfection got into the
way, they ended up not having any forum at all. You'll find existing
discussions on that topic in the mailing list archive as well as in
trac.torproject.org.

That's at least how I perceive this problem.

And what happened?

There is the more or less (?) official q/a style forum on stackexchange:
https://tor.stackexchange.com/

Bad choice, since hosted on a third party page. Bad for privacy reasons.
Also constant risk of getting that page deleted. Because the page has
only 2,3 instead of 15 or at least 5 new questions per day.
(https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/56447/tor) Therefore not
fulfilling the in my opinion irrational "beta requirements". The risk of
getting that page deleted doesn't motivate me to contribute.

In my opinion having askbot hosted on torproject.org wouldn't be worse
than stackexchange.

And there is the unofficial forum:
http://torforum.org/

In my opinion having smfforum, phpbb or similar hosted on torproject.org
wouldn't be worse than torforum.org.