Karsten Loesing <kars...@torproject.org> writes: > Hello devs, > > the Tor Metrics website [0] claims to be "the primary place to learn > > <snip> > > 2.2 Link to external websites > > Somebody might write a website that visualizes Tor network data. The > Tor Metrics team reviews the idea behind it, but not necessarily look > at its code, and adds an external link to Tor Metrics. It becomes > obvious that the authors remain responsible for their visualization, > so there's no risk involved for Tor Metrics, but users may not trust > it as much, because it doesn't have the Tor Metrics label. Note that > we're already doing this approach by linking to the visualizations > showing "Tor users as percentage of larger Internet population" [2] > and "Data flow in the Tor network" [3]. Also note that we could as > well have hosted the former directly on Tor Metrics with appropriate > attribution, because it's a static image. This is not the case with > the latter. > > 2.3 Run an externally developed website as if it were part of Tor Metrics > > Let's imagine that somebody produces a visualization of Tor network > data and would like to make it part of Tor Metrics but without > limiting themselves to the technology used by Tor Metrics. We could > let them write their visualization as website and integrate it into > Tor Metrics after reviewing its code. > > Technically, part of this integration would be to "redress" the > website by applying the Tor Metrics design (which has lots of room for > improvement, but let's just say the result will look as seamlessly > integrated into Tor Metrics as the "Network bubble graphs" [4]). > Another part would probably be to rewrite web requests, so that users > still think they're talking to https://metrics.torproject.org/, but > really they're talking to another webserver behind that. > > Regarding hosting and maintenance, in theory, the website could be > hosted by the original creators, but that effectively means that the > Tor Metrics team gives up part of the control about what's on the Tor > Metrics website. The creators of the external website could change > parts or add new parts that wouldn't be reviewed by Tor Metrics > developers, but they would be perceived as part of Metrics, which > seems bad. The Tor Metrics team could run the externally developed > website on a separate host or on the same host as Tor Metrics. We > could imagine variants where the original creator stays around to fix > any issues as they come up, or we could imagine that they donate their > visualization that the Tor Metrics people will then maintain. We > could even imagine that the Tor Metrics maintainers some day decide to > integrate the originally external website into Tor Metrics proper, but > that would not be required for this model to work. > >
I find this idea of external graphs interesting and fun with a small potential for disaster. if the external graphs are added with a strong indication of being "unofficial graphs made by third parties" or "experimental graphs" I think it might help in making them look less official. Also, even if the graphs are hosted on a third party server, you can always remove the link from metrics, if they end up replacing the graph with a rickroll video or something. Of course, if we don't trust the third parties here and they are malicious, they could do this selectively in a way that we never notice. Do we have a list of graphs and figures that we would like to include to metrics but we can't currently because they are hard to integrate to the current system? I can imagine the uncharted graphs showing network activity being one of them. What else? In any case, I liked the thread and I really appreciate we are thinking of scaling metrics for the future. It's really important! _______________________________________________ tor-dev mailing list tor-dev@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev