Envoy is Back Online with Design Overhaul

After a month or longer of regular downtime, the Envoy discussion forum has relaunched with a complete redesign.

Envoy, one of the more active darkweb forums, has been offline for more than a month. According to Envoy co-administrator F0rtuna, the developers responsible for the forum’s uptime contracted COVID-19, leaving nobody capable of keeping the forum defended against denial of service attacks. The virus was also responsible for F0rtuna’s own absence, he said in a recent message.

Bad_medicine, another co-administrator of Envoy, commented on the downtime on May 8 in a post on the forum’s subdread:

Due to some unfortunate events, including a worldwide plague, a series of DDoS attacks (DDoS attacks which, I might add, came from at least two sources), and a lot of hard work on the part of our dev team to get our new CMS ready (for some strange reason, kidnapping a bunch of nerds and sticking them in a cellar to code 24/7 is not exactly the most effective work method), Envoy’s been suffering some downtime for the past few weeks. On top of that, F0rtuna was also in the hospital with coronavirus, and claims he both saw and sexually assaulted several angels when they came to take him away. Unfortunately, he’s back now.

However, our dev team is finished with our new DDoS protection. The CMS is well on its way. We bought ourselves a dozen swanky new servers and we’ve kitted them out in the most beautiful way. Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to tell you, no longer will you have to suffer the indignity of a 404 error whenever you type our beautiful onion address into your browser.

Envoy will always return.

F0rtuna, on the same subdread, has been regularly dropping hints and previews about a new Envoy CMS.

Beta testers received access to the new version of the forum last month.

Here is the changelog provided by F0rtuna:

• Brand-new, homemade Envoy Superior CMS with heightened security, better formatting and cleaner look.
• Updated and simplified logo.
• Specialized and customized pages for partners, donations, and announcements.
• More convenient spaces for banner ads.
• At-a-glance Stats list on the sidebar.
• Reworked profile pictures and user profile page.
• Intuitive moderation and admin panels for the staff.
• Added Membership Levels (Silver, Gold, and Platinum) for the most active members.
• Better posting, commenting and thread formatting.
• Donators Wall of Fame.

He additionally provided a roadmap of future projects:

• BBCode and similar styling reworks.
• Improved DDoS protection and additional onion mirrors, including staff mirror for upkeep during periods of DDoS.
• Fixing issue of child and parent boards all showing on the frontpage.
• Launch of CannaMed, a cannabis-based community board made using the Envoy Superior CMS.
• Open-sourcing of the Superior CMS.
• Addition of the long-awaited harm-reduction live chat.
• Thread icon fixing.

One post on Dread indicates that work on CannaMed, the “cannabis-based community board,” is already underway.

Envoy is back online here: envoys5appps3bin.onion