The name 'Torsion' is not ideal

[special]

The name 'torsion' was chosen at random some years ago, and has three major problems:

• It vaguely implies a relationship to Tor that doesn't exist, when it should be clearly independent
• There is an unpleasant association with a testicular condition
• It's not very searchable

If a better name can be chosen, it would be good to change this as soon as possible.

[special]

Suggestions welcome. origami was mentioned courtesy of armadev.

[glamrock]

Origami is cool =)

[special]

tim (or tIM, no acronym implied) is another option. It is also not searchable, but avoids the other two problems. URIs would change too: origami:rs7ce36jsj24ogfw or tim:rs7ce36jsj24ogfw.

It's also worth thinking about how someone who hasn't learned about the software will discover how to handle one of these IDs when they're encountered. Search-ability may be very important. Or maybe the URIs should contain some other keyword or domain name that a person could look up.

[Antaon]

origoim - Two sylibles: Or-EE go-im (Oreo minus the o at the end and "go im" rhymes with "go in")
Rememberable: Or I go IM
Uniquely searchable: "origoim" has very few search results, so it would be easy to become the main result.
Domain name origoim.net is available.

[glamrock]

What about Guten Tag? Like Bonjour, only more German ;-)

[special]

nameless

orveil is an interesting one. It brings to mind orwell and surveil, concealment, and stands for onion-routed

[adrelanos]

A name that yields no search results on google is imho ideal, imho.

• no competition with other search terms
• no trademark issues
• all discussions about $project_name can be found when searching for $project_name

[dioxx]

i was thinking last night and i have an idea:

cantor. That's mean a can+tor. The idea of a can came to my childhood, where we do a telephone with two cans and a wire and only we can ear what was said. Even the symbol will be easy to do, like to cans united by i wire or two onions instead of cans.

it's just an idea, but i think have to do with the software.

[stnkris]

FULL DISCLORE I am not a developer of this project just chiming in with my two cents.

I like the idea behind cantor but it's not easily searchable, and it has the same problem of implying relation with Tor.

An idea I had for a similar project I work on (using Tor just not a fork of Torchat and written in Node-Webkit) was called Keystalk with the idea of being "Keys Talk" or like beanstalk (for logo or branding) I would be fine with giving that name away and surrendering any usage of it if people want to use that. It's google hits are low and unrelated (Black Eyed peas or some crap)

EDIT Also forgot to mention it can also be "Key Stalk" which is a way to relate to a user someone who might be stalking your public key.

[hsribei]

IMHO the name doesn't have to be unique to be searchable. As long as it is unique in the "namespace" of apps or of chat apps, it's fine. People would search for <name> chat or <name> app.

I like origami. Some other random names that come to mind:

Ricochet
Brownian

Ok, I might come up with more later :) Congrats on the great project, btw!

[adrelanos]

The name "Whonix" was suggested on the tor-talk mailing list. Might be a
good idea to ask for name suggestions there.

[special]

Thanks for all of the suggestions! It's a difficult decision.

@dioxx's cantor was a good idea, but the connection with Tor makes it unusable. @stnkris's keystalk is nice too, but it reads as stalk, which seems like the wrong association to make.

I'm currently liking origami and ricochet. Neither is uniquely searchable, but @obvio171 has a decent point about that. They're nice to say, and can be made more descriptive with something like Origami IM where it's needed.

route was also mentioned by someone. It's a little hard to build off of, but Route IM and route:rs7ce36jsj24ogfw aren't bad.

I seem to have a bias towards good pronunciations. Hmm.

[majestrate]

How about Chattor? It's a combination of chat+tor and a variant on chatter.

[dioxx]

days ago i had an idea: how about Whisper?

[bookie988]

whispersystems.org
TorTalk (its got nothing to do with tor, neither does torchat, still using it)
Date: Mon, 19 May 2014 22:56:04 -0700
From: notifications@github.com
To: torsion@noreply.github.com
Subject: Re: [torsion] The name 'Torsion' is not ideal (#20)

days ago i had an idea: how about Whisper?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[special]

Thanks for all of the suggestions (and sorry it took so long!). I decided on Ricochet, which is unique among instant messaging applications, and I like the sound of it.

Github and Transifex are renamed. ricochet.im is the new URL, with SSL and hopefully a proper landing page coming soon. Old configurations and addresses will keep working, but as of the next release addresses will start with ricochet:.

Updated binaries coming soon.

[DomT4]

Just a heads up that your SSL cert gets a great big red/yellow flag on Firefox & Chrome because of the self-signing. Namecheap do pretty decently priced SSL certs if you're looking for one.

[stnkris]

Namecheap also takes Bitcoin, so in theory we could all pay for it.

[hsribei]

Awesome! @special would it be ok for me to have attribution for coming up with the name on whichever form of about/contributors/authors/readme file/menu you decide on please? I'm very happy and proud that I could make a contribution :)

[special]

@DomT4 yep, I'm waiting on a response for something. If that doesn't work out, I'll buy one. Will be fixed soon.

@obvio171 Absolutely! You're in AUTHORS.md and the 1.0.2 changelog

[hsribei]

\o/