Title: Unbounded by Lantern Author: getlantern Published: September 22, 2026 Last modified: September 22, 2026 --- Search plugins ![](https://ps.w.org/unbounded-by-lantern/assets/icon.svg?rev=3707736) # Unbounded by Lantern By [getlantern](https://profiles.wordpress.org/getlantern/) [Download](https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/unbounded-by-lantern.1.2.1.zip) * [Details](https://wordpress.org/plugins/unbounded-by-lantern/#description) * [Reviews](https://wordpress.org/plugins/unbounded-by-lantern/#reviews) * [Installation](https://wordpress.org/plugins/unbounded-by-lantern/#installation) * [Development](https://wordpress.org/plugins/unbounded-by-lantern/#developers) [Support](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/unbounded-by-lantern/) ## Description Roughly a third of the world’s internet users live behind some form of national censorship. Unbounded lets the people who visit your site help, without installing anything: the widget adds a switch to your page, and a visitor who turns it on lends a small amount of their bandwidth to relay traffic for someone whose government blocks the open internet. Nothing happens until a visitor chooses it. The switch is off when the page loads, and the proxy engine is not even downloaded until it is turned on. Visitors can turn it off at any time, and closing the tab stops it. This plugin is the WordPress front end for that widget. It adds a settings screen for the widget’s appearance and placement, and a checkbox in the page editor to turn it on for a given page. #### What you can configure * **Layout** — banner, panel, floating, or simple * **Theme** — light, dark, or follow the visitor’s system preference * **Location** — top or bottom of the page * **Where it appears** — per page via the editor sidebar, on all posts, or on the homepage #### Open source Unbounded is developed in the open at [github.com/getlantern/unbounded](https://github.com/getlantern/unbounded). The plugin source lives in `ui/wp-plugin`, and the widget it loads is in `ui/`. ### External services This plugin is a client for the Unbounded network, run by Lantern. The widget cannot work locally: relaying traffic for someone in another country requires peers, signaling, and exit infrastructure, all of which live in the service. When the widget renders on a page — before the visitor has done anything — their browser contacts: * **embed.lantern.io** — serves the widget bundle and its images, and hosts a small invisible frame the widget uses to remember volunteering statistics. * **fonts.googleapis.com / fonts.gstatic.com** — the widget’s typeface, Urbanist, from Google Fonts. * **plausible.io** — usage analytics, loaded inside the embed.lantern.io frame. On load the widget sends it two events: that it rendered, tagged with the embed type (web page or browser extension), and the state of the switch, which is off. The switch event is sent again whenever a visitor changes it. The load event carries the hostname of the page the widget is embedded on. While the switch is on, one further event is sent each time the widget starts helping a new person, tagged with the same hostname. Every site that embeds the widget is listed automatically on unbounded.lantern.io/leaderboard and ranked by these counts. A site that should not appear there can ask to be removed at github.com/getlantern/unbounded/issues. Plausible’s own script adds its usual page metadata, including the frame’s referrer— the site the widget is embedded on, usually just the origin, as trimmed by that site’s referrer policy. Plausible is cookieless and keeps no persistent identifier for the visitor; Lantern uses the counts to report how many sites run the widget and how many visitors volunteer. Nothing else is contacted until a visitor turns the switch on. After that: * **embed.lantern.io** — the WebAssembly proxy engine, around 12 MB, which is why it is fetched on demand from the service rather than bundled into this plugin. * **geo.getiantem.org** — a country lookup, used to draw the map and to warn visitors who appear to be in a censored region that volunteering may not be appropriate for them. * **freddie.iantem.io** — peer discovery and connection signaling. * **unbounded.iantem.io** — the exit servers that relayed traffic egresses through. If the widget’s page freezes or crashes, a diagnostic report is also sent here: timing measurements, the page’s address, the browser’s user-agent string, and the widget build. It carries no identifier for the visitor. * **netstated-d7bbec1ed55b.herokuapp.com** — anonymous network-state updates that power the live map of active connections. #### What is kept in the visitor’s browser The widget stores a few values in browser storage: the interface language, a crash- recovery marker, and — inside the embed.lantern.io frame, so it follows the visitor across sites that run the widget — running totals of people helped. None of it identifies the visitor. Unbounded does not track visitors, set advertising identifiers, or collect personal data. Relayed traffic is end-to-end encrypted between the person being helped and their destination; a volunteering browser cannot read it. * Privacy policy: https://lantern.io/privacy * Terms of service: https://lantern.io/terms By installing and enabling this plugin you are choosing to load the widget from these services on the pages you enable it for. Please tell your visitors, and add it to your own privacy policy if you have one. ## Installation 1. Install and activate the plugin. 2. Open **Unbounded** in the admin sidebar and pick a layout, theme, and location. 3. Decide where the widget appears. Either tick **Display on Homepage** or **Display on Posts** on that settings screen, or enable it for individual pages: edit a page and tick **Enable Unbounded on this page** in the editor sidebar. 4. View the page. The widget renders with its switch off, waiting for a visitor to opt in. ## FAQ ### Does this slow down my site? The widget bundle is deferred, so it does not block rendering. The proxy engine is only downloaded for visitors who turn the switch on. ### Does it use my visitors’ bandwidth without asking? No. The switch is off on page load and the proxy engine is not downloaded until a visitor turns it on. Turning it off, navigating away, or closing the tab stops it. ### Can my visitors get in trouble for volunteering? Volunteers relay encrypted traffic; they are not the exit point, so traffic does not appear to originate from their connection. The widget also detects when a visitor appears to be in a censored region and warns them before they opt in. See the privacy policy for details. ### Can I host the widget bundle myself? Yes, with the `browsers_unbounded_script_url` filter. Be aware that a self-hosted copy is pinned to whatever build you copied and will eventually fall out of step with the network, so the hosted URL is the default. ### Why is the HTML element called “browsers-unbounded”? The product used to be called Browsers Unbounded. The element name is the widget’s public API and renaming it would break every existing embed, so it stayed. ## Reviews There are no reviews for this plugin. ## Contributors & Developers “Unbounded by Lantern” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin. Contributors * [ getlantern ](https://profiles.wordpress.org/getlantern/) [Translate “Unbounded by Lantern” into your language.](https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/unbounded-by-lantern) ### Interested in development? [Browse the code](https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/unbounded-by-lantern/), check out the [SVN repository](https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/unbounded-by-lantern/), or subscribe to the [development log](https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/log/unbounded-by-lantern/) by [RSS](https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/log/unbounded-by-lantern/?limit=100&mode=stop_on_copy&format=rss). ## Changelog #### 1.2.1 * Added a plugin icon for the directory listing. #### 1.2.0 * Prepared for the WordPress Plugin Directory: license and plugin headers, translatable strings, uninstall cleanup. * Settings are now validated against an allowlist before being saved. * The widget bundle is registered with `wp_enqueue_script` and can be redirected with the `browsers_unbounded_script_url` filter. * Added the “simple” layout, which the widget supported but the settings screen did not offer. #### 1.1 * Renamed from Browsers Unbounded to Unbounded. * Fixed a PHP warning and empty widget attributes on a fresh install, before any settings had been saved. #### 1.0 * First version. ## Meta * Version **1.2.1** * Last updated **19 hours ago** * Active installations **Fewer than 10** * WordPress version ** 5.0 or higher ** * Tested up to **7.1.2** * PHP version ** 7.4 or higher ** * Tags * [censorship](https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/censorship/)[privacy](https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/privacy/) [proxy](https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/proxy/)[volunteer](https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/volunteer/) [webrtc](https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/webrtc/) * [Advanced View](https://wordpress.org/plugins/unbounded-by-lantern/advanced/) ## Ratings No reviews have been submitted yet. [Your review](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/unbounded-by-lantern/reviews/#new-post) [See all reviews](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/unbounded-by-lantern/reviews/) ## Contributors * [ getlantern ](https://profiles.wordpress.org/getlantern/) ## Support Got something to say? Need help? [View support forum](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/unbounded-by-lantern/)