A change that’s long overdue is now imminent: ILP is getting its first major overhaul.
The site has used the same software since its inception in December 2001, phpBB. For years that software and the server that ran it were kept up-to-date, but beginning in the second decade of the millennium those updates became less frequent. Minor updates were skipped, and then major updates were skipped, until eventually enough time passed from one update to the next that the normal, easy, routine update path was broken. The software that under-girds the site had crystallized into what it’s been for over a decade.There’s no easy way to break from such a sclerosis, the edifice must be torn down and rebuilt.
Must implies may, and the need to build it up from the bottom offers the chance to rebuild it in a form morr suited to our needs. And so: in a couple weeks ILP will switch from phpBB to Discourse, meaning a slightly different look and feel, and a lot of new and useful features: real-time chat, user mentions, post-by-email, direct replies and cross linking, wiki posts, etc.
But ILP is not the software it runs on, it’s a community, the people that come and the conversations they have. And the community will be moved intact: users, posts, forums, PMs, everything carries over.
To see what that will look like, I’ve created a test site that contains a snapshot of posts from the end of January. You can access it here: chaos.ilovephilosophy.com
You can log in and post as normal [EDIT: if you have trouble, try logging in with your email address instead of your username], but keep in mind this is only a test environment, any changes you make will be destroyed in the final migration. I encourage you to experiment with posting, editing, replying, liking – click the buttons, muck about. There are guides and pop-ups on the test site to get you started, or you can read the New User Guide.
If you find anything broken or missing or ugly or annoying, let me know, the software’s flexible and extensible, so let me know what it needs. After I’ve confirmed that it won’t collapse under load, I’ll announce a specific date for the final migration, but tweaking will continue as long as it needs to.
For practitioners of a discipline still reading and discussing questions posed millennia ago, change can be hard. But philosophy benefits from new technologies that facilitate discussion. The new software will do that better than the software we’ve used for more than twenty years. Times change, but the conversation continues.
PMs should be visible on the test site: under ‘Messages’ in the sidebar on the left, or click the mail icon in the dropdown menu from your avatar in the upper right.
Please check that everything you’d expect to be there is there. Mine are accounted for and I didn’t see any PM-related errors in the logs, but more confirmation is better.
_
Is there still a maximum limit of messages allowed? as that was really annoying, in keep having to delete messages that one didn’t necessarily want to have to delete.
I don’t believe there is. That was one issue from having dated software, that stems from a time when storing lots of text could realistically fill up storage. Nowadays storage is cheap, so it shouldn’t be a problem and I don’t even see a setting for it, but if I do I’ll turn it off.
Issues noted so far:
Avatars in quoted text are broken. That’s because I ran the initial migration on my desktop, so it’s looking for images on ‘localhost’ instead of ‘chaos.ilovephilosophy.com’ That will be fixed in the final migration.
Usernames with spaces in them may be causing login problems. Logging in with email works, and putting in an underscore for a space might also work.
Email to and from the test site is currently disabled, and won’t be fully enabled until after migration. We’re switching away from self-hosted email, which will be more secure and reliable. But email providers want to be sure you aren’t using their service to send spam, so for now it’s restricted.
This forum works perfectly well.
There is absolutely no reason to change its software, and you know it.
What Carleas is doing is converting this forum from a privacy-respecting forum
into a privacy-violating forum, which mandates TLS 1.3 (which is incompatible
with the older browsers that have a javascript-disabling option, because
their respective companies had not yet been hijacked by the NSA, and, by
extension, incompatible with pre-2007 Windows, 2007 being the year in which
the NSA hijacked the Windows company), if not also javascript itself (the
quintessential privacy-violation tool which psychopaths love so much).
As of the present time, this forum is the ONLY philosophy forum which uses
fully privacy-respecting software, and now Carleas is going to decrease that
number of philosophy forums from 1 to 0.
Carleas is either doing this out of his own privacy-violating desire,
or he has received a software-alteration mandate letter from the
National Security Agency, along with a gag order which forbids him from
mentioning the mandate letter, and a bullshit-explanation for why the forum
software must change in a particular way. I know people who have received
such letters. Or, Carleas himself is a U.S. intelligence agent (CIA, most likely),
being as he states his location as Washington DC, such that he readily
complies with the commands of his boss, without any special mandate letter
being needed.
The fact that he is doing this only a few months after I personally registered
on this forum means that it is most likely one of the latter two possibilities,
because the NSA has forcibly de-anonymized or disabled MANY of the websites
which I personally have used, shortly after I personally had started using them,
so this is just a continuation of that pattern. They harass me in this manner
because I have exposed some of their privacy-violating methods and actions,
and they hate me for it.
Welcome to the site, Next. Given your suspicion, I’m not sure that anything I say will make a difference to you, but I’ll respond anyway since yours is the only pushback I’ve gotten and it gives me an opportunity to say more about the move.
First, I have not received a mandate letter or anything like that, and I don’t work for the government. I do live in DC; I was a lawyer, now I do contract social media analysis for a startup and take care of my kids.
I’m upgrading the site to the new software because it’s easier to run and maintain, it’s cheaper and better-performing, and it adds features that support the site’s purpose for being. Yes, it uses modern web technologies to do that, and that means it may not support operating systems and browsers that are 15 years out of date. However, one of the new features is better email interactions: the site sends regular digests by email, and I’m working on setting up posting by email, so your interaction with the site could be entirely mediated through even older software if that’s your preference (you may need to log in at least once on a modern browser to get that working, but I’d be happy to work with you to get around it if that’s truly a barrier). And I’m surprised that your objection is based in part on the fact that the new software requires modern encryption protocols, that seems like a good thing if you’re worried about privacy.
It’s worth noting that ILP doesn’t have any information about you other than your email and IP addresses, and if I had to guess you’re already using services to mask both (e.g. ProtonVPN and Firefox Relay). I think the current software still has some Google widgets from when we used to run ads, but I don’t plan to install them on new software. I don’t see any third-party calls when loading a page on the test site, and it works fine with uBlock Origin and Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection enabled.
The vast majority of ILP’s content is publicly available. Most of the stuff that isn’t public is available to anyone who registers and is only hidden because it embarrasses me. The most private thing ILP hosts is PMs, which I super duper promise not to read but I probably could if I tried, so better not plan crimes on ILP at all.
I don’t want to know who you are or track you, I just want to talk philosophy with you. I imagine we have some philosophical disagreements about privacy,* but I don’t think that’s relevant here: I don’t have and don’t want any private data.
If you’re curious, you can read my Master’s thesis on the subject here – caveat that it was written shortly after your operating system stopped being supported and I haven’t read it in a while so I don’t know how well it’s held up in its implied predictions about technology.
To be clear, are you talking about sorting a category (what we call a ‘forum’ here), or sorting within a topic?
Categories can be sorted by recent activity by clicking on the word “Activity” on the right. By default the ordering will be based on your activity, so topics you’ve posted in and topics you’ve read will be up top.
Topics can’t be sorted, but by default you’ll be brought to the first post you haven’t read yet, and you can jump strait to the last post by clicking the date in the activity column, or in a topic by using the timeline slider on the right. I was a bit surprised that it isn’t possible to change this, but a lot of other functions depend on the assumption of a descending order (e.g. timeline scrolling, jumping to unread posts, jumping to last post, infinite scroll, etc.). The developers are also under the impression that very few users want this, which isn’t responsive to the fact that you do want it, but hopefully it is evidence that the net of the additional functions is an adequate replacement for a descending sort order.
The IP address of a username registration, forum post, or other forum action,
combined with the specific time of that action, personally identifies an ISP registrant
to the FBI and NSA, which has their software embedded in all of the ISPs.
All usernames that are registered by an identified person, and all posts and emails
that are made by that person, are added to the person’s profile by those entities.
You are referring to TLS 1.3.
If people want to be TLS-1.3-capable, then they shoud use modern Linux,
NOT modern Windows, becuz modern windows (2007 and later) contains
NSA-mandated built-in spyware.
But the much-more-important issue is not the TLS 1.3, but the javascript.
The question is:
Does your new forum require javascript for registration, posting,
private-messaging, and/or file-uploading?
Javascript, like Adobe Flash, circumvents proxies and VPNs and sends
one’s IP address directly to the site (and thus also to the intelligence agencies).
That is true regardless of how old or modern a person’s operating system
and browser are.
Privacy-violating psychopaths most-often create javascript-mandating
forum-sites via a “captcha”-type image in the user-registration page,
which does not load if the prospective registrant has javascript disabled
in their browser settings. The most notorious of such javascript-based
images is Google ReCAPTCHA, which the NSA often recommends in
its javascript-mandate letters, and which not only tells the personal identity
of the forum username to the intelligence agencies, but also adds that
forum username to Google’s personal-IP-address-profile in its giant database
of such profiles (and from which all forum posts by that username are
then subsequently added to that profile by Google’s forum-crawler bots),
and a large portion of those profiles do include a person’s name and/or
other personal-identifying information.
I’m not familiar with those, but, since you’re familiar with Firefox, the real question is:
Does registration, posting, private-messaging, and file-uploading, work with Firefox’s
add-on NoScript enabled, with all scripts and plugins blocked?
That is of no use to any privacy-savvy people, becuz the NSA has systematicly
forcibly de-anonymized or shut-down EVERY webmail website, both on the
clear-web and the dark-web alike, which formerly provided fully-functional
javascript-free webmail.
There is only ONE javascript-free webmail provider remaining, and it cannot send
emails, nor even store received emails, but only briefly retains its received emails,
for less than a minute, such that it can be used for website registrations and
nothing else.
The truth or falsity of this claim does not appear to depend on the software we’re using.
chromeOS is modern linux, and I’d expect that to be as government-infiltrated as anything else.
I like and use Linux (and not only chromeOS), but just because it’s Linux doesn’t mean it’s not compromised.
This isn’t true. Javascript is just a language that modern browsers know how to parse. That’s true for HTML too: when you enter a URL, your computer contacts a server and requests a file, the file is sent back, and your browser turns it into the webpage you see. Both languages give your browser instructions on how to structure the contents of a website and what additional resources to send requests for (for example, if there’s an embedded image, it says ‘get this image at {image address]’).
The big difference is that Javascript can create dynamic web pages; Javascript is a Turing-complete language. The downsides are 1) more processor intensive for the user, because the computation is done by the browser instead of by the server (contrast php, which runs on the server and builds an HTML file on request), and 2) lots of things besides clicking on a link can be treated as interactions (e.g. if the file says ‘call NSA on mouse movement’).
But both run entirely in your browser, if you’re concerned you can watch the code run and you can modify how it runs. Doing that could break things, but to my knowledge blocking requests to NSA IPs will not break anything on ILP post-migration.
Registration: Short answer yes, though I don’t think this would affect existing users (as long as they can send email from the email address attached to their account). Partial longer answer is that there may be ways to enable new users to post and reply without creating an account, but it wouldn’t be possible without significant administrative intervention.
Posting: No, caveat that it might not be live from day 1. I know email posting is supported and I’m hoping to get it set up within a week of migration, but there are unknown unknowns.
Private-messaging: Yes for new PMs, no for replies (by default, might be possible to change this with plugins).
File-uploading: Not sure. I’d assume email replies with attachments add them to the post, but I haven’t tested it.
I haven’t tested it, but I think yes, if ILP is set as a trusted site. As I understand it, NoScript’s function is customizable, so a lot will depend on how you have it set up. But other than e.g. embedded media, the site shouldn’t be pulling files from anywhere but our server. If you see otherwise, let me know.
You can use a local email client that doesn’t use the browser. Some will use javascript, but they don’t need to, email doesn’t need javascript to retrieve message contents, it’s only used to display the contents in fancy boxes. You don’t even need a graphical interface, see Mutt, which is entirely text based and runs in a command line.
I’ve learned through this process that running an email server that can reliably contact most email addresses is pretty tricky, because most big email providers distrust self-hosted servers to limit spam. And for good reason honestly, it’s surprisingly hard to prevent an email server from abetting spam.
As for compromised email, I’ve heard good things about ProtonMail, though I can’t vouch for it more than what’s publicly available (they also run the aforementioned ProtonVPN, and the email service is the reason I know about the VPN service, so discount the two suggestions as only one vote in favor of the whole operation).
I think this is the kind of service Firefox Relay is trying to provide. It’s less anonymous than what you’re describing, because you need to have an account with Mozilla and expose your email to them. But it lets you receive and send from persistent mask emails that can be created for purpose, and so masks your real email from websites besides Mozilla.
A lot of these services are not free, and most payment types will do all the government surveillance things you’re trying to avoid. I imagine there are services you can pay with cryptocurrency, but they are less trustworthy because you can’t verify who they are to hold them to their promises. But that gets at the problem with privacy.
That’s quirky! What do you like about it? How does it change how you read/engage? For comparison, I don’t think Facebook/Twitter/Insta support descending sort, how does your use of those sites differ as a result?
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem possible on the new software at the moment, sorry about that. I hope the additional features balance it out, and I’ll keep an eye out in case it changes (though as I said, the developers don’t seem to be motivated to add it).
.
The ability to scroll all the way down to the last post in an instant, cancelled out my need for the ‘descending posts’ option.
.
…apart from the animated emojis, I’m not inclined to anything else from the old site… especially my 200-odd draft replies.
:-" 
=D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D> =D>
