I've been thinking about the future of anonymous communities for a while. Most text/imageboard scripts try to mimic older sites, instead of trying to advance the state of the art. The rare new feature is added with a hack, without any fundamental re-thinking.
Here are some random ideas I've come up with. Not all of them are feasible or good.
Discuss.
Many of those things sound to me like vehicles for abuse and probably would only be practically used to facilitate child porn trading. Especially that private message thing.
There are already several boards for music, PDFs, etc. Look around.
> would only be practically used to facilitate child porn trading
Reminds me of this: http://www.pigdog.org/auto/mr_bads_list/shortcolumn/1914.html
If you want to dismiss my ideas, that's fine. But does that mean the future of anonymity looks exactly like what it does today?
What do you think moot is going to do with the $625,000 in venture capital that he raised for a project called "Canvas"? Here's my prediction: it's going to be a 1. completely new 2. website 3. with anonymity. But what will it look like, and what features will it have?
Personally, I hope it's not all full of Facebook and web 2.0 crap. That's about as far from anonymity as you can get.
To me, the most basic concept of an anonymous board is that a message cannot be traced back to its poster. I think even storing an IP address is more than what the ideal anonymous board should be doing. The only legitimate use for an IP is to ban abusive posters (and the only two things that should really qualify as abuse are spam and child porn), so on my own boards I run a script that scrubs IPs from any post that's more than a week old.
I think Linking with Facebook/Twitter/Youtube and all that crap is completely missing the point, and registering usernames even more so. Anything that persists state information between one message and another ought to be theoretically minimized or removed. With current anonymous boards the only useful exception to that is the poster ID, but I think that concept is also flawed: Kareha uses the IP address to generate the poster ID, so it's still technically possible to do long-term user tracking with it (if you know the salt which is used to hash the ID; and with sufficient computing power this could be theoretically determined).
Honestly I have a very dismal outlook on anonymous boards. Not very many people see any practical use or benefit to them, and those who do aren't usually interested in them for actual reasons of anonymity. What I would like to see is a system where no one post can be traced back to its author, or correlated with other posts, but where it is still possible for an author to (willingly) self-identify as a previous poster on the thread. I think the most obvious implementation of this would be with a public-key system, where new key pairs are generated for each message unless one wants to deliberately identify as the author of a previous post.
This could even be handled with existing board software with a few modifications (and likely also some education about public-key authentication and message signing to the prospective users), but I think if it were implemented in a streamlined manner, it would be far more groundbreaking than any of the ideas presented in >>1. (and a great number of >>1's ideas have in fact been implemented in various forms on anonymous boards already)
>>4
Storing identifying data is a valid concern.
Poster IDs are cryptographically secure (when done correctly), so I don't think they're a problem. Opt-in self-identification for certain features (whether it's using a tripcode, a password, or a cookie) doesn't violate the spirit of anonymity. It's already common to use a password for post deletion. If you're careful, cookies can be used in a secure, non-identifying way.
Perhaps one aspect of the future of anonymity would be eliminating as much tracking and logging as possible. For a text board, legal disclaimers may be enough to give users and the site itself protection from libel/threats/national security/etc, without needing any tracking. IANAL.
Spam can be solved without using IPs.
HTTPS might be a good idea too.
"Cryptographically secure" now isn't always secure later. Especially with rapidly increasing computing power, even if the algorithms themselves aren't broken it could still be conceptually possible to brute force them.
If I post something incriminating, let's say, about a corporation (i.e. whistleblowing), which utterly destroys the careers of a few key personnel, they save the thread, and in ten years the computing power exists to break the scheme used to generate IDs, my anonymity might be compromised and I would be in a dangerous position.
I disagree with post deletion passwords as they currently work, because that one password can be used to link even different IP addresses. If I change my IP but don't clear the site cookie, I am still obviously the same person. With a public-key system previous posts could be deleted or modified with the same key that was used to post them, and if a system existed to help manage keys and post, this could be just as simple a manner as it is at present except with far greater security toward the user.
>>4,6
The IDs are indeed generated from the poster ID, but the hash is truncated. The original hash is a lot longer, like 20 characters or so. Therefore it's impossible to hack, even if you knew the salt.
Regarding #8, "message the author privately:"
There are a few reasons I'd be hesitant on that idea. First, implementing it means you'd probably be requiring logins. It's possible to achieve this functionality without compulsory registration (tracking with cookies or IPs), but they're much less reliable.
Second, because private messages are targeted to one person, they may be used to compromise his anonymity. A bad guy could PM you with an innocent-looking link that is on a server he controls, so when it is accessed, he's recorded your IP and all the other info modern browsers spew everywhere. If the same malicious link were posted in a public thread, it wouldn't be possible to pin-point exactly who clicked it.
Third, if the message content contains something actually useful and relevant to the thread, why should it be lost to the rest of us? It'd be much better for that message to be public, like the rest of the communication on the site. If it was simply a personal message like "contact me at this email address," the receiver has little way of knowing if the PM came from a genuine person or a stalker. If I wanted to build closer personal relationships, I wouldn't be on an anonymous BBS.
FWIW, I don't think the addition of other features to text-boards is a bad thing, but they should be carefully considered only after knowing exactly what one hopes to accomplish by deviating from the usual formula. I only mention it because I've recently been writing my own interpretation of what an anonymous text-board should be (lol, sup canv.as?) and >>4 has been an interesting read.
It looks like a National Identification Card, like most of the world.
I just leave it here
>>1
Pretty much everything you ask for is in Kusaba X already except for two of them: Private messages and API crap.
Private messages are for socializing, socializing for faggy social networking websites, the *chans and *chan culture in general is about anonymity, not socializing. Witch brings me to my next point.
Linking with other web applications like you say is every web2.0 and kills anonymity. Ever think about accounts?
>>14
There is but it's kinda closed.
http://anoma.ch/
You could try to request invite if you want to.
>>14 There's http://metachan.ru It's not an imageboard per se, it's archive of various other imageboards threads, but it uses oprhereus for engine.
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