The open forum was the original exchange forum for users and developers. It was intended as a space for suggestions for improvement, discussions and assistance - but it also became a popular place for complaining. Initially, the usual more or less obvious software errors were complained about. Later, the forum was also used to draw attention to content-related grievances. For example, valid arguments were used to remove the generally popular postman tracker from the Java router homepage. This was followed by more difficult topics, such as the question of how to deal with human rights. In the absence of binding rules for administrators, the moderation of participants, especially of critical contributions, was arbitrary and hidden and was neither comprehensible to participants nor contradictory to the terms of the contract: "Whatever you do or write in here....it's not my fault or my problem (but that doesn't mean I don't care)." (forum.i2p: Registration Agreement Terms). As a consequence, it happened more and more often that those who drew attention to grievances were fought against. Individual posts and sometimes entire threads were removed because it was feared that the issues raised could damage I2P's reputation.
The forum was initially accessible both via I2P and from the Internet, initially at forum.i2p.net and later at forum.i2p2.de. The open Internet access via forum.i2p2.de has since been closed by the operator due to alleged attacks. On April 24, 2017, forum.i2p was finally taken offline.
- Internet Archive:
Errata: In the first version I had entered the date 2008 instead of 2004, because I had already forgotten the renaming and Wayback treats the history separately. I have added links, so you should be able to research the history of I2P to some extent.
