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Jérôme Charaoui authoredJérôme Charaoui authored
- Tutorial
- How-to
- Enable new topics by email
- Use the app
- Mirror a mailing list
- Pager playbook
- Disaster recovery
- Reference
- Installation
- Domain rediection
- Onion service
- SLA
- Design
- Akismet plugin
- Issues
- Maintainer, users, and upstream
- Monitoring and testing
- Logs and metrics
- Backups
- Deleting topics and posts
- Other documentation
- Discussion
- Overview
- Goals
- Must have
- Nice to have
- Non-Goals
- Approvals required
- Proposed Solution
- Cost
- Alternatives considered
Discourse is a web platform for hosting and moderating online discussion.
The Tor forum is currently hosted free of charge by Discourse.org for the benefit of the Tor community.
Tutorial
How-to
Enable new topics by email
Topic creation by email is the ability to create a new forum topic in a category simply by sending an email to a specific address.
This feature is enabled per-category. To enable it for a category, navigate to
it, click the "wrench" icon (top right), open the Settings tab and scroll to
the Email header. Check the box next to Accept incoming emails sent to:.
The email address is managed automatically by Discourse, there's no need to create it. However, the address doesn't automatically appear on the forum so to allow users to discover it, it's a good idea to add it to the category description.
Per the forum's settings, only users with trust level 2 (member) or higher are allowed to post new topics by email.
Use the app
The official companion app for Discourse is DiscourseHub.
Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be available from the F-Droid repository at the moment.
Mirror a mailing list
The instructions to set up a forum category that mirrors for a mailing list can be found here.
The address that needs to be subscribed to the mailing list is
torproject1@discoursemail.com.
Pager playbook
In case of a problem with the forum, we should start by checking the Discouse status page and the @DiscourseStatus Twitter profile.
For any inquiries regarding issues with the forum, including unacknowledged downtime, we should contact team@discourse.org immediately.
Disaster recovery
In case of a major problem with the forum, we should contact the Discourse people at team@discourse.org. They have access to offsite backups.
Manual backups can be triggered and retrieved via the web interface, see Backups. Such backups could then be used to recreate the forum on another installation of Discourse, in case of a catastrophe.
Reference
Installation
The forum software was installed for us by the Discourse team, in their cloud infrastructure, so the only thing that needed to be set up from our side was a DNS entry.
The address chosen for this service is https://forum.torproject.net/.
It was decided to use the .net suffix instead of .org per TPA-RFC-6.
Domain rediection
For convenience, a HTTP redirection is set up in our infrastructure pointing
forum.torproject.org to forum.torproject.net.
Onion service
We asked for this but unfortunately the Discourse team isn't interested in
setting up an onion service for forum.torproject.net. This may be an argument
in favor of hosting the forum on our own infrastructure down the road.
They suggested we make one available via proxy, but we didn't look into that.
SLA
Since the forum is gratuitously hosted by Discourse for the Tor Project, the SLA on this service is "best effort".
The status history suggests that outages are relatively rare.
Design
Akismet plugin
The Akismet plugin, enabled by default, is set to never submit data to Akismet
via the skip akismet trust level being set to 0:new user.
This was discussed in a forum thread here.
Issues
There is no issue tracker specifically for this project, File or search for issues in the team issue tracker.
Maintainer, users, and upstream
Upstream and service maintainers are Discourse.
This service is available publicly for the benefit of the entire Tor community.
The forum is administered by the service admins which are lavamind, hiro, gus and duncan.
Monitoring and testing
At present TPA does not monitor forum.discourse.net in any way.
Logs and metrics
Some logs and metrics are recorded by Discourse. Details are available in their privacy policy.
Backups
This service is hosted by Discourse.org which handle creating and storing backups for the forum:
Off-site backups are created every 12 hours when hosted by Discourse. To access an off-site backup, or to restore an uploaded backup, please contact us.
It's possible to trigger the creation of a downloadable backup via this page on the admin interface. Once the backup is completed, a download link is sent by email to the admin who requested the backup.
Deleting topics and posts
The design of Discourse is such that when a post is deleted via the web interface, it's merely flagged as such in the database. There is no purging of these records either, they remain for the life of the instance.
To delete a post on Discourse requires direct modification of the database, which is obviously warned against by the developpers.