Mirror Version for Tor Browser?

FakeCIA · February 9, 2020

I think it would be pretty nice to have a mirror version of the forum and maybe Floatplane via Tor Browser. The benefits are increased security and privacy. The potential disadvantage is slower loading times, up to a minute, but by lessening the amount of ads and other high volume features on the mirror version, that time can be reduced. While I can already sign in on Tor, some features are blocked or disabled.

colonel_mortis · February 9, 2020

The forum software doesn't support accessing the site from more than one base URL, so it isn't possible for the site to be accessible from both linustechtips.com and a .onion address. However, because we use Cloudflare, any Tor traffic that comes through tor should get routed directly to Cloudflare without needing to go via an exit node, which should provide equivalent benefits to actually serving on a .onion domain (with the catch that you have to access the site once via an exit node to discover the alt-svc configuration).

4 hours ago, Lauren Harper said:

but by lessening the amount of ads and other high volume features on the mirror version, that time can be reduced.

Ads should already not block loading, and should be very cheap to load (they are just images), so removing them would not improve the experience.

4 hours ago, Lauren Harper said:

While I can already sign in on Tor, some features are blocked or disabled.

Which features are they? We don't try to disable anything for Tor users, so anything that doesn't work is most likely a Tor browser thing, and serving the site directly through Tor wouldn't change that.

FakeCIA · February 9, 2020

A mirror doesn't technically need to be registered as an onion address unless you strictly want to operate on the Tor network as an isolated system. That's better for security, but for a niche audience. As for the ads, they will load slowly over every page, blocking them on mobile. Tor recognizes the ads as malicious, attempting to get rid of them, but ends just freezing the forum on whatever page you were last on. Only way to get rid of it is lower security settings, which I'm not a fan of. It might be cookies or JavaScript, if you guys use that. I use Tor Browser by the Tor Project on Android 10.