Should we have a "standard" for posting .onion links, in answers or questions?
I don't think it matters; if they're on this site they probably know what an onion link is. If not, they'll figure it out pretty quickly (or at least guess that it's 'a Tor thing' and look it up).
Besides, that sort of thing will just be hard to enforce and require a ton of edits.
It would be good to annotate them as such. Markdown does parse .onion links correctly:
However, unlike normal links, it's impossible to tell where a Tor link goes. It would be good etiquette to give links like this:
The best solution requires SE Dev intervention, but involves adding the following to the site's stylesheet:
a[href*=".onion"]{ color:red; } # Hidden services links are styled differently
And maybe, just to be extra-sure:
a[href*=".onion.to"]{ color:orange; } # .onion.to links are styled differently again?
Onion links could be wrapped in a proxy by adding a ".to" suffix.
For example:
http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/ could be linked as http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion.to/
It's a proxy -- there's probably more than one service that does this.
http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion.to/
This would make the links friendly for people that browse on non-tor systems.
It would be dangerous, I think, to automatically forward readers via .onion.to gateways. Users could encounter content that's inappropriate for them, their current environment and/or the device configuration that they're using. Indeed, hidden service links should append hostnames to the link descriptions, and point to Want Tor to really work?.
I think every entered .onion links should be appended automatically by .to. That is an proxy address. For example :
http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/ should look like http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion.to/.
That makes our site friendly for people, which not use Tor.
