Let's get critical: Dec 2013 Site Self-Evaluation

Question

We all love Tor Stack Exchange, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from Google, what will their first impression be? Let's try to look at this site through the eyes of someone who's never seen it before, and see how we stack up against the rest of the 'Net.

The Site Self-Evaluation review queue is open and populated with 10 questions that were asked and answered in the last quarter. Run a few Google searches to see how easy they are to find and compare the answers we have with the information available on other sites.

Rating the questions is only a part of the puzzle, though. Do you see a pattern of questions that should have been closed but are not? Questions or answers that could use an edit? Anything that's going really well? Post an answer below to share your thoughts and discuss these questions and the site's health with your fellow users!

Answer 1

After going through the review queue (most of which were asked, edited, or answered by the same small group of people), and checknig our most recent stats on Area 51 the biggest thing that sticks out for me is the fact that we only have a handful (36) of active users.

This is partially due to the fact that the Tor community in general likes to stay anonymous online and a great many people create a new account each time they ask a question, post an answer, etc. These accounts aren't spam (they're mostly legit questions and answers); it's just the way the Tor community does things (weather they need to or not is a different question alltogether).

However, despite that, there are still a very small number of active users compared to total users.

The other thing I noticed while going through the review queue is that the answer quality was consistently low. I suspect that this will improve with time (or once we fix the above problem and have more active users).

Answer 2

Final Results

• Why isn't Do Not Track enabled?

Net Score: 5 (Excellent: 5, Satisfactory: 0, Needs Improvement: 0)

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• Is there any possibility that exit node in one of our sessions will be our own relay?

Net Score: 4 (Excellent: 4, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 0)

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• Are there any Tor Cloud alternatives?

Net Score: 2 (Excellent: 2, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 0)

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• Run Firefox In Tor Browser Bundle using Tor Relay Bundle

Net Score: 0 (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 1)

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• Which kinds of relaying Tor servers are available as "rendezvous points" and "introduction points" for hidden services?

Net Score: -1 (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 2)

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• Exit Nodes in restricted countries

Net Score: -1 (Excellent: 0, Satisfactory: 5, Needs Improvement: 1)

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• What is the reasoning behind keeping hidden service onion RSA keys at 1024 length?

Net Score: -3 (Excellent: 0, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 3)

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• Is it possible to use tc (traffic control) in linux to limit the upload speed?

Net Score: -3 (Excellent: 0, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 3)

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• Whonix problem with others IPs

Net Score: -5 (Excellent: 0, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 5)

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• Sharing Tor network via Wi-Fi for Circumvention

Net Score: -5 (Excellent: 0, Satisfactory: 1, Needs Improvement: 5)

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Answer 3

In addition to Sam Whited's answer, I was fairly regularly struggling to find the questions+answer pages in Google results for related terms. Often I'd have to go to the second page, only rarely were we high up in the rankings - usually for specific terminology where I used the exact terminology in the question.