/ratanon/ - Rationalists Anonymous

Remember when /ratanon/ was good?


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 >>/11/
I kind of hate Lynxchan but it has the virtue of being modern and basically working. Its user interface is godawful, but at least it's not PHP. I don't have a clearly better suggestion.
I didn't realize that the hidden service was working. That's encouraging, they must have a host.
Ideally we'd have a third party provider that's permissive enough for our purposes but doesn't get political or heavily emphasize free speech.

 >>/12/
Not them, but the advantage of a provider like 8chan or Endchan is that they don't care about our individual board at all and are unlikely to have a reason to interfere with it. I'm inclined to trust you, but this could plausibly be an attempt at a power grab.
 >>/13/
> Its user interface is godawful
The Lynxchan frontend is apparently modular. I don't know exactly what options exist, but I would hope there are some that aren't disgusting.

> the advantage of a provider like 8chan or Endchan is that they don't care about our individual board at all and are unlikely to have a reason to interfere with it
Right, that's what I was getting at by describing you as having effective sovereignty. Although I guess I don't actually know what powers a board owner has on one of these sites. Is it limited in some way? As in, does a malicious host have better ways to wreak havoc than a malicious board owner?

> this could plausibly be an attempt at a power grab
I unironically enjoy /ratanon/ with its current norms and wouldn't want to change them to swing my dick around. To me, the personal appeal of hosting is the edgy cyberpunk street cred of running an imageboard in 2019.

For now it makes sense to wait a few days to see what happens to 8chan, especially since the other anon (i.e. 1/3 of our community) has expressed skepticism. I really do expect this to be a recurring problem though.
Oh, and one other thought. If 8chan doesn't come back up, we might need to publicize this place or wherever we move to regroup. Some options:
> SSC subreddit (and/or TheMotte)
> SSC open thread
> LW (no idea if this would be appropriate, I haven't actually been there in a while)
Where else?
 >>/14/
Lynxchan's frontend is modular, but that's mostly used as an excuse by StephenLynx to not think about its design too much. The alternative frontends I've seen inherit most of the problems of the default one, being forked from it, and though I don't know the internal architecture in much detail I suspect some of the problems extend into the backend. One thing that caused me a lot of grief is that moderation logs are split by date, but not by board, making them absolute hell to search through.
There are functional concerns as well. The "early 404" anti-spam feature used to be pretty much useless. 8chan's version automatically deletes threads with fewer than 10 replies when they reach page 5, which makes flooding a board with empty threads less effective while limiting collateral damage. Lynxchan's version automatically deleted threads with fewer than 5 replies after an hour, which meant it'd destroy any board that isn't extremely active while doing nothing against a flood attack that's carried out in under an hour.
StephenLynx changed the feature after I complained, to his credit. The description in the Endchan mod panel is still of the old behavior though. I hope it's just the frontend that's outdated.
Lynxchan uses spreadsheet-driven design. That is, there's a spreadsheet with a list of features 8chan has, and StephenLynx tries to tick all the same boxes for Lynxchan, instead of adding features as needed in a way that solves problems.

8chan is more polished on the outside but not much better overall.
There are ancient design flaws carried over from Tinyboard. Every board gets its own database table, which scales hilariously badly and means that most features that span boards are broken. There's no way to get a global post history for a poster, even though their IP hash is the same on every board.
The current software, OpenIB, was supposed to be a hardened fork of the old software. The first hardening step they took was hashing IP addresses, but as far as I know that was also the last step. They don't make a serious effort to improve security.
Ron asked to hire me to do an audit, but I declined because I didn't even know PHP, which says something about the way he looks for auditors. A year later I had learned some PHP, so I took a look to see if anything jumped out, and by grepping for places where it used weak equality I discovered that if you make a board /04/ you also have board owner access to /4/, /004/, etcetera. There's no excuse to have that kind of bug. There are linters that could find that bug. But nobody found it, which must mean that nobody looked. I reported that and a few other bugs, and they're fixed now, but I'm sure it was just scratching at the surface. I don't trust it.
On the other hand, if you can run a site as large as 8chan without people digging that deep it'd probably suffice for a smaller site. Installing it is non-trivial though.

It's really surprising how dysfunctional everything is.

> Although I guess I don't actually know what powers a board owner has on one of these sites. Is it limited in some way? As in, does a malicious host have better ways to wreak havoc than a malicious board owner?
Board owners can moderate however they like, sometimes with a political restriction that if they make the board unusable other people can claim ownership. Site owners could in principle do outlandish things like add malicious JavaScript or harvest IP addresses. But it's more about having to trust two people instead of one.

 >>/15/
#ratanon on Freenode, if it still exists.
 >>/13/
> the advantage of a provider like 8chan or Endchan is that they don't care about our individual board at all
Another advantage of 8/Endchan is that there is a well-defined mechanism for another person to take over a board whose owner has disappeared or gone rogue on the posters. This was how 8/ratanon/'s current owner acquired it.

 >>/12/
> I would have sovereignty as host
Please don't say this, because you wouldn't. Recent history shows that "sovereignty" over a conventional website is a laughable concept. You would not own your domain name, DNS, CDN or the up-link pipe. At best you could own the actual server if you put it in your garage.
> Is your concern that he has a solid track record, while I have no reputation?
Yes, this is huge concern. What if you're that anon who has been monomaniacally posting race?
 >>/13/
> Its user interface is godawful, but at least it's not PHP.
I think the first part is enough to disqualify it. It is not going to be an improvement for the users, and JavaScript is the next worst thing after PHP. Regardless of the programming language and the internal flaws, a Tinyboard or vichan fork will actually be somewhat nice to post on. If you insist on avoiding PHP (I can't blame you too much for it), there are other "modern" alternatives like https://github.com/bakape/meguca, which looks quite decent and is written in Go. The "live posting" feature would be awful for something like /ratanon/, but you can disable it.

 >>/16/
> by grepping for places where it used weak equality I discovered that if you make a board /04/ you also have board owner access to /4/, /004/, etcetera.
lol
> It's really surprising how dysfunctional everything is.
This would look good on a banner.
 >>/18/
I think the board claim mechanism might have done more harm than good. It's first come first serve, and boards can become eligible even if the board owner is still around but doesn't log in.
One of the people who claimed the board nuked it.
 >>/16/
> But it's more about having to trust two people instead of one.

It's still just one person to trust, the host. A host that's involved with the board content, as would be the case, would have unilateral power to remove any other board owners whose actions they disagree with. A rogue owner under a benevolent host would be a temporary nuisance at worst.

 >>/18/
> Please don't say this, because you wouldn't.

Relevance? The issue you're describing doesn't suddenly appear with self-hosting. By "sovereignty" I mean unchecked control over the specific content of the board, not immunity from deplatforming attempts, which hasn't existed in any case. And the benefit of having an independent homeland is precisely that we are unlikely to be caught up in such attempts.

 >>/19/
I'm not attached to Lynxchan. My only reasoning was that the vichan repository has a disclaimer saying its developers recommend not using vichan any more, and they give Lynxchan as an alternative. Meguca looks nice.
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I've adjusted my opinion of Lynxchan further downward.
There's a captcha at the bottom of the page for moderator actions. It refreshes automatically whenever it expires.
If it doesn't load properly, for example because of a server hiccup, the page goes into some sort of busy loop with 20% CPU usage.
The Oslo shooter announced it on Endchan. Private hosting is starting to sound pretty good now.
Regardless, I'll try to restore the board here in a few hours. We can always move again later.
 >>/3076/
> I've been on 8chan for years and never encountered it, not even in the hidden board leak.


Back on the 8chan /sudo/ board, there was this one thread bitching up a storm of "what do we do about the RAT menace?" Thing is, it wasn't clearly defined who they were, or what they were about, just that some group was spamming /b2/ (or wherever) with some bullshit. I didn't see any obvious problems, so I guessed is was a furry backlash against an artist group advertising their Skaven porn.

I don't have a problem with Skaven porn.

Here on Endchan, about a day or two ago, I tripped over this board from seeing a thread on the /overboard/ and stopped in to have a look around. That's when the 'ole LED bulb clicked on. I suppose one could say they're essentially a bunch of RationalWiki autists.

I don't have a problem with RationalWiki autist types either.

I am kinda disappointed in the lack of relevant porn though.
 >>/3076/
An offshoot of LessWrong and Slate Star Codex, a fan club for a certain Anglo continental philosopher, and a place where approximately 50% of the inhabitants wishes to be the little girl. Since said philosopher is the founder of accelerationism, and as we know 'accelerationism' means 'mass shooting', we're basically galaxy-brained right-wing Communist SJW (left-wing anarcho-capitalist survivalist) non-practicing domestic terrorists.

For more information please visit
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/FAQ#What_is_Less_Wrong.3F
https://slatestarcodex.com/about/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land
https://www.punoftheday.com/

> not even in the hidden board leak.
It is good to hear that in its original home /ratanon/ was properly occulted.

 >>/3267/
Cute.
I guess the overboard doesn't exclude hidden boards.

 >>/3076/
/ratanon/ was listed in at least one hidden board leak. But it was never super active, so it probably didn't stand out. The current activity is from a bot restoring backed up 8chan threads.
We're back.

I set a stupidly high thread limit, but it silently caps at 15 pages. The threads made on Endchan unfortunately fell off and some old 8chan threads didn't make it, possibly including recently bumped ones.
 >>/16/
For all these reasons I've been wanting to write an imageboard engine that's not shit but also modern. The only problem is that it takes absolutely forever, and I don't have that sort of time to throw away.
> Every board gets its own database table
What the fuck, this is terrible
> the server is fugged m8
> something something backend failure
> endchan backend server failed to respond in time
> please leave a message at the beep.

Is this really our new home?
 >>/6672/
> Is this really our new home?
Yes, until/if 8chan comes back. I've been toying with the idea of running an imageboard myself for specific topic, but I'm sure as hell not going to use Infinity or Lynxchan, those godforsaken pieces of software.
 >>/6670/
> data migrations and some queries appreciably more difficult to write
This, and the fact that you can't aggregate data across boards. While it doesn't necessarily degrade performance, it does make it harder to deal with the data and make it less useful globally.
 >>/6672/
Odili is working on setting up the new Endchan. He tries to salvage from the old faulty db as much as he can, so things go slow. I don't think anyone did such as he's doing now and there are unexpected difficulties. Bear with us.
EndChan has all the design sense and competence of LW 2.0. The catalogue hides missing OP images, making it impossible to click through to the thread. Every available page layout is ugly. I hope we can go back to 8chan.

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