This is funny, because there’s meta thread after meta thread every few months complaining that the team / mods don’t accord the respect to others equally invested in this forum.
When the team / mods make such comments, have they been sent away?
“Excellent” is stretching it, tbh.
It is team-run? If you’ll accept that / own up to it, most of the grievances that crop up from time to time, I imagine, will go away.
All reasonable excuses. May be there are others on this forum who would be more proactive & can take place of the current group of volunteers? Considered exploring that avenue before?
The reason is because Apple controls the underlying platform, and when they make warnings like this it usually means the feature may be unavailable in a future version of macOS. If your app relies on “the old way” then it simply will not work on this newer release when Apple changes their mind on something.
We know Apple is striving for convergence on iOS as with macOS and there are some things macOS can do simply because of it’s BSD roots. It started off as a much more “open” and less secure platform than iOS. It’s obviously not an engineering surprise that Apple wants both of these platforms to rely on as much of the same base and APIs as possible. I think even from a marketing point of view that’s what they’re trying to get across with jumping to version “26” everywhere.
As for disappointment with this thread? I would handle that by looking into methods to offload the VPN to a router of some kind regardless of whether your on Windows, Linux or MacOS. Frankly VPN client software is a major pain in the butt and if you have multiple devices its a lot nicer way to go about it.
All these kill switches are kinda dodgy hacks no matter which platform they are implemented on. They always contain some method of using a rules based firewall to allow the VPN full access out but not anything else.
These approaches are much more complicated than one where a router simply has the decision path:
"I get these packets from this source (your device) and
because they are from this source they go into that interface (the vpn)".
Drop everything else.
Packets originating from the router itself normally do not go through the VPN, but that is only a few minor things like NTP, DHCP, ICMPv6 and other networking related protocols required for functionality. Also incidentally you avoid all “DNS leaking” issues too because those packets are treated in the same way.
We call this forwarding of packets, and if you’ve ever used Linux’s iptables this is the FORWARD rule.
TLDR yes, developers of VPN software are somewhat more limited on Apple platforms especially if Apple says “you must not do this if you want to be in the App Store”. Apple often does enforce various limits typically around the use of their APIs (which they clearly state pf is not).
There are so many posts and so much talk in all of them, it feels like a mess. I don’t know where to comment this so I’m just picking a related thread at random here.
All this talk, while productive and useful to make informed and consensus based decision still isn’t yielding to a decision that should have been made months ago at this point. Like I said earlier, the forum is growing and so is the activity here - having just 4 paid PG staff is not enough. We need more to keep up with and better manage the platform, even as capable Jonah is (in the capacity of the project director) and will continue to be.
Here’s why I think it should not have taken this long. If there are issues being reported by many many people with a particular product, then the entire team behind PG should test it out themselves from scratch to reproduce the issue to see for themselves. And then make a call based on what I still feel are well thought out criteria for each product category. If a beloved or a popular product no longer satisfies it, then it must be removed. I am referring to improper kill switches on macOS and Linux for Proton here.
This clearly would yield in a fragmented recommendation of products from PG. The only solution I could come up with here is to overhaul (as dramatic as that sounds, it’s not) the way PG recommends - not per product category but device based first.
For example: Instead of recommending VPNs to use, talk about which tools to use for which device and separate it by device type and not app/tool wise.
macOS recommendations:
DNS
VPN
Notes
Browser
etc…
iOS recommendations:
And so on.. because not all apps work the same on all platforms and continuing to have it be this way is just leading to problematic recommendations even though said product is perfectly usable and works well on other devices.
I don’t think anyone has yet come up with this as a solution so please think about it before taking another few months to make a decision on it. It’s time to be decisive here. Listen to the community.
Now, this doesn’t mean we should not touch the criteria you have set for each product type. You can also amend those should you feel it needs changing after so long but for the most part, they do seem alright and there are tools that satisfy them all so I don’t see a need to amend those just to accommodate a particular product.
To the PG team: please take heed. I hate to see this level of discrepancy and the growing number of unhappy users here.
Honestly, I think the PG team and moderators show a lot of patience with the oversized egos of some users, whether they are members or not.
I find it disrespectful that they get called out for being slow, or that conspiracy theories are insinuated just because (in my opinion) things don’t go the way the community wants.
I’ve been commenting in the ‘Remove ProtonVPN’ thread and instead of listening to each other, the “conversation” (if you can even call it that) consisted of dismissing people and bringing up things that had nothing to do with what was being discussed. It even got to the point where someone posted a meme in a more or less serious thread after I deleted my account. In the end, an irrational mob formed that wasn’t listening, just pointing fingers.
I keep creating and deleting accounts because I don’t want all my replies associated with a single username, and I have been a forum member for some time.
And I don’t want to be a bootlicker, because I have nothing to gain from it, but we should all be very grateful for the work that many volunteers carry out — both the PG team (moderators included) and users with very broad technical knowledge who contribute their bit daily to the conversations. It’s incredibly valuable to find people from Peergos, ReThinkDNS, NovaCustom, Proton (), Mullvad, DivestOS ()… all in one place. (Only the GrapheneOS folks are missing — wonder why?). The recommendations and discussions on the website and forum should be approached with optimism, not resentment. Political issues often come up (multinationals, ICE…) as well as geopolitical ones (European sovereignty…) which are inherently charged topics — but the goal isn’t to act out of hatred and anger, but to protect our human dignity and move toward freedom, without punishing anyone for a comment one thinks is wrong, by listening to those who know more, asking questions, and answering with what one knows or believes one knows, as long as one thinks it can add something.
Edit: I once again mistakenly clicked the wrong reply and replied to a particular person instead of replying to the thread in general. Is there a way to edit that afterwards?
First things first: Thanks to all the moderators and everyone on the team for investing their time
Even though I don’t fully agree with some of the things the people attacking ProtonVPN say I have to say that it feels like the moderators and the team seems to be more and more overwhelmed. And it’s okay to be overwhelmed imo. They have so much to do and some of the moderators seem to be non-technical people, which is again totally okay, IF there are technical people with enough knowledge to confidently speak about things and address issues. BUT it’s not okay to be overwhelmed and not doing anything about it.
The core problem imo is that the forum has grown over the past few years and that there is more work to do. Maybe it really would be time to think on how to tackle the additional work? Maybe it’s more trusted community moderators, maybe it’s something else.
FUD has been on the rise here for quite a while. People trying to push their own agenda as well. Imo the general quality of the forum is way worse than a few years ago and it would be great to get back to those days.
So I think the blame game and pointing fingers isn’t really helping anyone but it is fairly obvious imo that something needs to be changed. Those huge changes are something that only the team can do. If they don’t do it this forum will descend more and more into chaos and in the end only people spreading FUD and people in the beginning of their privacy journey will be here (like on some subreddits). Many smart people that this forum had once have already gone and it is truly sad to see
Similarly to Forum Moderation - #56 by jonah I think this post has reached the point where everyone’s opinion has generally been shared, and we are not adding anything new to the conversation. In fact, recently this thread is veering far off-topic and into issues people have with moderation here, which is not even what OP is about.
I’m locking this thread because now that we have heard your feedback, we actually need time to discuss and reflect on it, which evidently we cannot do while people are constantly making new posts about the issue that we need to respond to.
In this case, the entire Privacy Guides team is larger than the number of forum moderators and spread across many different timezones, so it is simply impossible to provide any sort of answer to this thread instantly. We need time to reflect on this, and I hope you can give us that time, but in the meantime we cannot simultaneously continue to have this discussion here
), Mullvad, DivestOS (
)… all in one place. (Only the GrapheneOS folks are missing — wonder why?). The recommendations and discussions on the website and forum should be approached with optimism, not resentment. Political issues often come up (multinationals, ICE…) as well as geopolitical ones (European sovereignty…) which are inherently charged topics — but the goal isn’t to act out of hatred and anger, but to protect our human dignity and move toward freedom, without punishing anyone for a comment one thinks is wrong, by listening to those who know more, asking questions, and answering with what one knows or believes one knows, as long as one thinks it can add something.
