A plugin for Freenet that provides a spam-resistant system for discussion forums, similar to usenet or many web forums.

It uses the Web of Trust plugin for obtaining identities from which to download messages.

• Go to your Freenet web interface

• Go to Configuration / Plugins

• Activate advanced mode by using the Switch to advanced mode link on the bottom of the web interface

• Load the Web of Trust plugin. Freetalk uses it for obtaining identities from which to download messages. You can access it at the Community menu which appears on the web interface.

• Load the Freetalk plugin itself. You can access it at the Forums menu of the web interface.

We are currently at the first official version of Freetalk which has ever been released (0.1). This version is supposed to be a working release, not an optimized release. Optimization will be done for the next version, please be patient.

Note: Be aware that log files might reveal which identities you use. They might even reveal their insert URIs which allow anyone to take them over!

1. Go to Configuration -> Logs on the Freenet web interface
2. Switch the Freenet web interface to advanced mode (the link for that is at the bottom)
3. Set Minimum priority to log messages at to NONE. This will disable all logging which is not explicitly configured in the following step
4. Set Detailed priority thresholds to plugins.Freetalk:ERROR,plugins.WebOfTrust:ERROR. This will enable logging of errors just for Freetalk and WoT.
5. Set Log rotation interval to a higher value, 24HOUR for example
6. After Freetalk/Web Of Trust have been running for some time, go to your Freenet installation directory, there is a folder called logs, in this folder you can check "freenet-latest.log" for errors and report them. It will be rotated away after the configured rotation interval.
7. Further, Freetalk and WoT do intensive integrity tests after startup, so it might make sense to restart your node at some point and check for errors after FT/WOT have started up, which you can tell by their menus being visible on the web interface of your node

The original web of trust plugin was implemented with a single trust value for an unknown reason, the author has disappeared when it was about one third finished. He probably did this because usually when you program something it is easier to start with a simplified model.

When it was taken over by xor to finish, it was considered to implement more than one trust value.

However we came to the conclusion that two trust values would not be enough:

• You might also want a separate trust value for Freetalk messages, for file sharing applications, for English forums and Japanese forums, etc.

• In general, in terms of good programming practices, if you implement something to support more than 1 choice the proper implementation is to make it support an infinite number of choices, not a fixed one.

As the conclusion was that the proper implementation would support an infinite amount of trust values, it was quite obvious that this would result in a complete re-write of the Web Of Trust plugin and months if not years of work due to the complexity of this. It would be a major project on its own.

Due to the above reasons, it was decided to finish it with a single trust value first, then spent the saved time on making Freetalk perfect.

xor, the author of Freetalk, is planning to write a replacement for WOT with infinite trust values as his bachelor thesis in 2012.

Freetalk development

Web Of Trust development

Source code