'lo.  Well, as I'm sure most of you have noticed, TFE is DNFing at the
moment, and while I think we have a good set of starting links, its kind
of frustrating to new users to click on the first link after installing 
freenet and get DNFs.  I'm sure TFE will be back shortly (I hope!), but
in the meantime, maybe we should consider more seriously the discussions
of how to customize the fproxy homepage links.

There were some discussions about this on IIP / freenode, and its pretty
much the same issue as the bootstrapping problem - how do we get people
their seed nodes and their seed bookmarks?  Ian mentioned how it'd be 
good if we could reduce Freenet Project Inc.'s liability as "promoting"
these bookmarks, and while I'm sure we can all think up really good ways
to deal with the bootstrapping problem, I think we need something that
can work in the short term.

What I'm proposing is something a few people have already proposed - make
the fproxy homepage links user configurable by storing them in a 
configuration file - aka fproxyBookmarks.conf:

SSK at rBjVda8pC-Kq04jUurIAb8IzAGcPAgM/TFE//;The Freedom Engine;Oldest living 
Freenet portal
SSK at Pqb7VI1DhPl1kaB0p4-CJyFfUUcPAgM/TII//;The Index Index;Index of freenet 
entry points
SSK at -w495UL3mfSlWC2c~nRAuG2fAWwPAgM/TFEE//;The Tower (TFEE);Categorized 
automatically generated index with Google-like page ranking
SSK at Sc6qV~D6iFhaYord6HtbjJ8MaEYPAgM/YoYo//;YoYo;Categorized freenet index

In addition, we add the ability to pull down the "latest" default 
fproxyBookmarks.conf from hawk, just as we pull down the "latest" default
seednodes.ref.  This would be done in the ant build script and as a command
line util.  

What does this get us?  It lets us adapt the default fproxy links for new 
users without having to release yet another version that only contains 
changes to the hard coded bookmarks in one file.  It also lets users 
configure their own homepage.  This could be implemented by end of day 
(though I'm not saying what timezone ;)

What this doesn't do is deal with the long term issues of "how do we 
propogate links without depending on big index sites?" or "how do we
remove any of Freenet Project Inc.'s liability for the default sites?".
This is a short term fix that will help us get by until we solve those
issues, including the soon to be /.-swamped 0.5.1 release.  

Hopefully TFE comes back ASAP.  Thats what I think everyone wants.  But
the unforseeable always happens, and this will let Freenet adapt more 
easily if/when another of the main page sites gets unreachable.

Thoughts?  Is there another simpler solution, should we work out the
long term Right Way, or should we just ignore it and hope TFE comes
back soon?

-jrandom

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