[tor-dev] Tor Relay Setup Wizard

[Karsten Loesing]

Hi Damian,

On 7/13/11 7:01 PM, Damian Johnson wrote:
> Hi all. Over the last few weeks I've been working on a relay setup
> wizard for arm. Its purpose is to make volunteering to be a relay
> easy, narrowing the options to those most commonly used and giving
> nice descriptions/defaults to encourage good configurations.
> 
> At present relay setup for new users, particularly exits, is either
> confusing or limited. For users doing it without a controller we have
> a deluge of man page options and a confusing bundle of docs. For
> Vidalia users, however, it's easy to become a middle hop or bridge,
> but the configurations it makes for exits are poor (default exit
> policy, no front page, no notice for how to reduce abuse complaints
> which probably leads Vidalia exits to be short lived...).
> 
> This wizard consists of three pages...

arm and this wizard look really great! :)

Just a few minor comments below...

> 1. Selection for what you'd like to be
> http://www.atagar.com/transfer/tmp/arm_wizard1.png

I wonder if the order of configurations on that page should rather be:
Exit Relay - Internal Relay - Bridge - Client - Cancel.  The default
could still be "Internal Relay," but the order could imply to people
that the higher something's in the list, the more they contribute.

Or does this wizard start automatically when arm starts?  In that case,
setting "Internal Relay" as the default could be problematic.  If people
use arm on their clients, they shouldn't be tricked into becoming a
relay only because that's the default.  They should know what they're
doing when setting up a relay.  But 90% of all users go with the
default, so if "Internal Relay" is the default, they'll just pick that
and hope for the best.  (Ignore this comment if the wizard is explicitly
called "Tor Relay Setup Wizard" and if people need to actively start it.)

Missing word: "This is a safe and easy _way_ of making the Tor network
better."

> 2. Picking your relay options, with both descriptions of the options
> and why you'd want to set them
> http://www.atagar.com/transfer/tmp/arm_wizard2.png

I wonder if there's a short torproject.org URL containing tips for exit
relay operators that you can show users here.

Again, this looks great!

Best,
Karsten