[tor-talk] Until there's a REAL effing way to communicate, that evey1 can use, I'm DONE

[Cat S]

Hello Anthony,


________________________________
 From: Anthony Papillion <anthony at papillion.me>
Sent: Monday, June 17, 2013 8:03 PM
Subject: Re: [tor-talk] Until there's a REAL effing way to communicate, that evey1 can use, I'm DONE
 

You seem to have been pretty active in the Tor community over the last  
decade. If the communications format is so horrible to you, why not do  
something about it?  Instead of going on a mailing list, using  
offensive language, and saying "why won't someone fix this", why don't  
*you* fix it?

Take a little time and learn how to properly and securely set up the  
software you think is needed and offer the project your services to  
host and run it.  That way, you'd have a solution to the problem and  
be officially backed by Tor.

Also, I'm surprised by your "Im done!" statement. Isn't your privacy  
worth a little more than convenient group communication. People don't  
stick with Tor because it's easy or has a great mailing list. The  
stick with it because they feel their privacy is more important than  
those things.

Just to reiterate: fix what you think is broken. Heck I'd even  
volunteer time to help you out if you needed it. Leaving isn't the  
answer: work is.

Anthony

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It's not the mailing-list communication is terrible to me, it's the newbs generally cannot and will not use it. This is akin (in my mind) to giving a kid a car (in this case, TBB) but not teaching the kid how to drive (in this case, easy to use and helpful discussion forum).

I did try to setup a Tor forum [0,1], last year, and paid for all by myself, but I couldn't get Mod_Security to install correctly [2]. I used https://1984.is, as suggested by Andrew. I was willing to pay all the bills until it got to the point I couldn't afford them any longer by myself (if traffic ever reached that point).

Even if I could have gotten Mod_Security installed, I wouldn't have been able to hack the forum code to the degree that Tor devs and others wanted. E.g., security features and whatnot. IIRC there was a good little list on tor-talk about what constitutes a 'secure' forum, but I can't find that right now. That would be a good place to start: people (not me) who are experts in this topic list what is needed to make them happy, in terms of security and anonymizing (e.g. the next-gen Exit Enclaves) connections and the site code.

My goal was to get a site up and running, like what Atagar did, but I couldn't even get that far. I'm a muse, not a coder.

In terms of my hyperbolic and reactionary "I'm DONE" statement, that was about donating to the Tor Project, not about me volunteering my time to help newbs (e.g. teaching them, and a very dirty batch code I'm writing so they can easily use TBB, Pidgin and TorChat Pidign plugin, they only need to click the batch file :) )


[0] "Server/host for Tor forum in Iceland or Norway?"
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2012-March/023815.html

[1] "Tor forum [WAS: Server/host for Tor forum in Icelandor Norway?]"
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2012-April/023828.html

[2] (paraphrasing) "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a computer scientist!"


P.S. Sorry about the "offensive language," I'm a bit salty, especially when I'm pissed . . . like when I read nearly two years of effort (granted, not 24/7) has been flushed down the drain.