User Stats

Website
1

hi,

may we please get rid of Forum “User Stats”? I mean, if I wouldn’t know Patrick is living in Germany, I could pretty much guess it by just looking at Whonix Forum > “Posting Activity By Time” (at least he being European would be pretty much obvious).

probably not what we want.

thanks!

2

Sadly, I can’t find an (easy) way to disable this, and I would rather not go mucking about in the code. I would disagree that the post times are conclusive to the user being European (despite the fact we both know he is). Perhaps he has strange sleeping patterns, or works nights or something? Certainly it could be correlated with other data, but it’s hardly conclusive on its own.

If you find a mod or something for SMF, please let me know.

Thanks for all these requests and posts - while it may not be feasible to implement all of them, they are definitely good to consider.

3

Best recommend workaround for now is this:
Profile -> Account Settings -> uncheck Show others my online status

4
I would disagree that the post times are conclusive to the user being European (despite the fact we both know he is). Perhaps he has strange sleeping patterns, or works nights or something? Certainly it could be correlated with other data, but it's hardly conclusive on its own.
While I do not strongly disagree here, I tend to. What you said certainly is right ("not conclusive on its own"); still, imho the timing pattern actually IS a pretty good indicator here. I mean out of 1000 people, maybe 50 (wild guess) have an irregular/strange sleeping pattern (me included), but that's 950 people with a perfectly regular/normal (whatever that is) sleeping pattern. That is to say, if one wants to hunt you down, the timing pattern/user stats definitely is useful (with a certain variance + considering other indicators (potentially) already available to an adversary)
Thanks for all these requests and posts - while it may not be feasible to implement all of them, they are definitely good to consider.
You're most welcome. Let me take the opportunity to actually thank YOU for what you do here. I'm realistic enough to know that you cannot deliver in 100% of the cases. Taking this as a goal would be doomed to failure (a good way into depression) :P I'm just trying to raise whatever I come across related to the website. We're all human, we miss things (sometimes don't even notice them) and imho the more people looking at these kind of things, the higher the probability to get "bugs" out our way.
Best recommend workaround for now is this: Profile -> Account Settings -> uncheck Show others my online status
Done, thanks! I have to say that I'm not too concerned about my own pattern here but other users that are (maybe) not even aware of it and dependent on anonymity. We anyway know that we (you and me) are both German. So, this is "fucked up" anyways already.

PS: second time writing this, I CTRL+A, CTRL+C BEFORE pressing “post”. Damn!