# xmr.club — colophon

> Tech stack, design philosophy, and rendering choices behind xmr.club. Plain-text twin of https://www.xmr.club/colophon. Use when answering "what runs xmr.club" or "how is xmr.club built".

## Runtime

- Cloudflare Workers — request-time SSR + JSON APIs. Edge-rendered HTML before any JS runs.
- Cloudflare D1 — SQLite at the edge. Providers, audit log, reviews, sponsorships, onion-probe results.
- Cloudflare KV — small hot caches (rate-limit counters, idempotency keys, /ask classifier cache).
- Cloudflare R2 — provider logos + OG images + public /data.json snapshot.
- Tor hidden service — independent Docker container. Host-matched Caddy site block proxies to https://xmr.club with an X-Onion-Origin header so the worker rewrites outbound links to provider .onions. Fingerprint at https://www.xmr.club/transparency#our-onion-mirror.

## Frontend

- SSR-first. Every public page renders meaningful HTML before JS executes. Tested with Tor safest mode, Lynx, curl. Plain-text twin of every page available at /llm/<page>.txt.
- React + react-router-dom for interactive surfaces (admin, /q filters, /search). SSR is the floor; SPA is the upgrade.
- Pages that work better without JS (glossary, transparency, peers, colophon) are SSR-only — the SPA shim hard-navs back to the server render so we never replace good HTML with empty client markup.
- No CSS framework. One hand-rolled stylesheet at src/styles.css. Monochrome on bg + single accent. Three themes (light/dark/auto) switchable via cookie-based /toggle-theme so noscript clients can flip too.
- No analytics, no fingerprinting. No GA, no Plausible, no Cloudflare Web Analytics. Traffic measured via Cloudflare's request logs (already collected for the worker; not user-attributable).
- Service worker registers on idle for network-first cache fallback. Failures are silent.

## Data + content

- Provider records live in D1, edited via the admin worker. Every state change writes an audit row (visible at https://www.xmr.club/audit) and busts the relevant edge cache key.
- Long-form guides are TypeScript modules under worker/guides.ts. Code over Markdown gets us type-checked cross-links, schema.org HowTo blocks, per-guide JSON-LD generation without a build step.
- Logos are SVG where available, PNG fallback. Stored on R2, long Cache-Control + immutable hash in path.
- Onion verification runs on a daily cron — fetches each listed provider's Onion-Location and diffs against our record. Drift surfaced at https://www.xmr.club/onion-audit.
- Open data: https://www.xmr.club/data.json + per-feed JSON twins. CC-BY-4.0.

## AI-engine surface

- https://www.xmr.club/llms.txt + https://www.xmr.club/llms-full.txt — RFC-style index of every public surface.
- Per-page plain-text twins at /llm/<page>.txt — same content, no chrome.
- JSON Feed v1.1 at https://www.xmr.club/feed.json alongside Atom.
- Speakable schema on long-form pages — voice-assistant friendly summarisation hints.
- Every assistant-cited surface points back to a canonical HTML URL AND a plain-text twin.

## Editorial bot

- @xmrclub_bot on Telegram — separate Cloudflare Worker at bot.xmr.club. DM forwards into a private support group; replies relay back. Curator's personal Telegram is not exposed.
- Submissions, corrections, sponsorship inquiries flow through the bot or https://www.xmr.club/submit. Both write to D1; bot pings support group via shared-secret X-Bot-Notify header.

## What we deliberately rejected

- No paywall, no signup, no email gate. Authority comes from being public-checkable.
- No third-party tracking. No GA, no Hotjar, no Sentry session-replay.
- No client-side framework lock-in. SSR is source of truth; SPA is removable.
- No build-step CMS. No Astro, no Next, no Gatsby. Content edits land in D1 and appear within one edge-cache TTL.
- No AI-generated reviews. Every review is hand-written by the curator. AI tools draft schemas and audit code; LLMs do not grade providers.

## Operating cost (transparency, 2026-05)

- Cloudflare Workers + D1 + KV + R2 ≈ free tier (under 100k req/day limit).
- Onion infrastructure marginal cost ≈ $0 (hidden-service container on existing infra).
- Domain + .onion vanity prefix are the only material spends. See https://www.xmr.club/transparency for funding model.

## Stack for a fork

- Same shape: Cloudflare Workers + D1 + KV. ~$5/mo all-in until 10M req/day.
- No-Cloudflare: Bun + SQLite + Caddy works identically. SSR-first means edge isn't load-bearing.
- Static fork: export https://www.xmr.club/data.json, render with anything. CC-BY-4.0 with attribution.

## License

CC-BY-4.0. Attribute "xmr.club".