Karsten Loesing karsten@torproject.org writes:
Hello devs,
the Tor Metrics website [0] claims to be "the primary place to learn
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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!