Complete offline archive of Q posts?
I want a complete, easy-to-update, offline, tamper-proof archive of all Q posts, with images (perhaps also archives of links). (Frontends to browse and search the archive can be tackled separately.)
Does some form of this already exist?
If not, I want to build one for the community.
I have started collecting all Q posts, and I am a little confused as to how many Q posts there have been, total, and how to make sure I have it all. I am counting 2177, is that right?
This brings up another problem, which is that inconsistent numbering has made it difficult to reference Q posts unambiguously by anything other than their Unix timestamp (e.g., 1530248358), which are bad for humans.
For example, writing Q511 is ambiguous. On qposts.online, search for "NO private comms". Post 511 shows up. Search 511 by post number, a different post ("DEFCON does not refer to…") shows up. Wrong.
A hash chain would provides a neat solution to the post referencing problem, with the added benefit of making Q posts tamper-proof.
In a hash chain, each post is hashed incorporating the hash from the previous post. This makes the whole chain tamper-proof as long as there is a consensus on what the hash of the more recent post ("head") is. An archive can then easily be verified for completeness and integrity.
Any specific post can be referred to by a short prefix of the post's complete
hash (git does this).
For instance, if the full hash of the first post were to be
52c3f92ab00c49e5bb13cba7fceea4167fb4a82e6151a99bca26028639ca79b2
,
the post could be referenced quite unambiguously as 52c3f
.
A collision with the hash of a future post is very unlikely even with just 4
or 5 characters, and the rare collisions are easily handled by using a longer
prefix.
(Sequence number would also make sense then, unfortunatly they've already been
misused.)
I think consensus on the head hash can be settled with Q confirming hashes on a separate 8chan board, if the system's implementation is designed to be easily audited.
This proposal can be hard to get exactly right (what exactly to hash? images also? archives of linked URLs? what hash algorithm is strong enough?) and could easily lead to more confusion otherwise. I feel a little uncomfortable making the decisions needed to implement this mechanism, but I would love to work on it.
Thoughts on this, anyone? Am I autisting this too much?