Self-hosting the Tor Project users forum
blog.torproject.org
blog.torproject.org
But then The Tor Project chose to move to a registration only forum where all the discussion of news is hidden away from the article. It's really impeded discussion of the tor project's decisions... which I think they consider a benefit. They didn't like having criticism of things like their early removal of tor v2 support on their main pages. Much better to hide in registration only forums requiring the latest bleeding edge browsers and JS to use, in part of the site no one visits.
However, links live on in a million places, and it's hard to motivate hobbyist webmasters of niche onion sites to migrate. On /r/Tor, we regularly get people asking why some onion site doesn't work, and it's a v2 site. That's two years after they stopped working. (I wish Tor Browser would detect a v2 attempt and give a nice explanation instead of an opaque error message, though)
The truth is that whatever schedule they could choose would cause allegations of it being too early.
I still host a couple v2 onions on brute forced vanity tor domain names. Because that's what I wanted to use tor for, the name system, not to be anonymous or secure or anything. I just didn't like having to "rent" a ~.com domain that's not mine. On tor I thought I owned my domains because I held the private keys. But the tor project relieved me of that delusion when they simply dropped support for v2 name resolution and (mostly) everyone stopped being able to get to my sites.
But that's tangential. Regardless of weather tor v2 removal was early or not, the switch to secluded, account requiring, forums instead of comments was bad. Self hosting the bad system doesn't make it better.
The Tor project doesn't exist for whatever usecase you were using it for.
> On tor I thought I owned my domains because I held the private keys. But the tor project relieved me of that delusion when they simply dropped support for v2 name resolution
Not routing to v2 domains isn't the same as not owning your .onion addresses? The latter is cryptographically guaranteed, is it not?
>This will offer us more control over the forum's configuration and allow us to provide an experimental onion service for our users accessing the platform via the Tor network.