Looking for front-end web developers for network status websites Atlas and Globe

by karsten | July 17, 2014

Hello front-end web developers!

We are looking for somebody to fork and extend one of the two main Tor network status websites Atlas or Globe.

Here's some background: both the Atlas and the Globe website use the Onionoo service as their data back-end and make that data accessible to mere humans. The Onionoo service is maintained by Karsten. Atlas was written by Arturo as proof-of-concept for the Onionoo service and later maintained (but not extended) by Philipp. Globe was forked from Atlas by Christian who improved and maintained it for half a year, but who unfortunately disappeared a couple of weeks ago. That leaves us with no actively maintained network status website, which is bad.

Want to help out?

Here's how: Globe has been criticized for having too much whitespace, which makes it less useful on smaller screens. But we hear that the web technology behind Globe is superior to the one behind Atlas (we're no front-end web experts, so we can't say for sure). A fine next step could be to fork Globe and tidy up its design to work better on smaller screens. And there are plenty of steps after that if you look through the tickets in the Globe and Atlas component of our bug tracker. Be sure to present your fork on the tor-dev@ mailing list early to get feedback. You can just run it on your own server for now.

The long-term goal would be to have one or more people working on a new network status website to replace Atlas and Globe. We'd like to wait with that step until such a new website is maintained for a couple of weeks or even months though. And even then, we may keep Atlas and Globe running for a couple more months. But eventually, we'd like to shut them down in favor of an actively maintained website.

Let us know if you're interested, and we're happy to provide more details and discuss ideas with you.

Comments

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July 17, 2014

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This looks like important work. One request: to the extent possible, minimize its dependence on JavaScript.

July 18, 2014

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> But eventually, we'd like to shut them down in favor of an actively maintained website.

Is not easiest way to find hoster, who would keep current Globe and Atlas alive?

July 18, 2014

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How useful is a javascript-based front-end given that a significant minority of tor browser users choose to disable javascript?

July 19, 2014

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Q: How can I anonymize my normal FF's user agent and make stealthy like Tor's? I tried many addons they all failed the test! Please help!!

July 22, 2014

In reply to arma

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Thanks for your answer.
I'm only looking to change my user agent string to one that is common (windows7, FF) but so far all my attempts failed, my question is how can I change it successfully like Tor does?

Yes. We need to make sure that everybody's download is the same, so they have a prayer of checking the hash / signature of it.

The default bridges work pretty well everywhere except China and sometimes Iran, where they learn about them after a while and block them.

July 20, 2014

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Thanks for this great opportunity, I have forked the repo will try my best to come up with a better layout as a start.

August 02, 2014

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I think that the design issues are the minor ones, i've just forked the repo and the code it looks great it really is, but it depends completly on javascript. The best course of action would, in my opinion, to move the rendering to the server side that is using node.

Maybe we can use the ember client side application if the user has javascript enabled otherwise just display the data from the server.