[tor-dev] Email Bridge Distributor Interactive Commands

[Nima Fatemi]

isis:
[...]
>> Are some of our least technical users, many of whom have never even seen a
>> command line before and who may live in Sub-Saharan Africa or one of the
>> Stan countries with only a rudimentary knowledge of English going to
>> understand the difference between vanilla bridges and, say, chocolate almond
>> bridges? Wouldn't it be better to choose terms that at least translate into
>> something resembling what they actually mean?
> 
> Noted. What to call bridges without any pluggable transports has been argued
> about for years, with the result that everyone ended up calling them different
> things all over the place, which I believe is worse.
> 
> Eventually, everyone figured out what "obfsproxy" meant, even if they didn't
> understand how it worked, nor how to pronounce it. My hope is that a
> consistent usage of consistently confusing and untranslatable terminology will
> eventually produce predictable and steadily decreasing levels of user
> confusion.
> 
> Should the interface say "get transport unhuggable", perhaps? The obvious
> choices were:
> 
>  1. `get tor bridges` / `get transport tor`
>          This is no good because it could potentially cause users to
>      erroneously think that pluggable transport bridges somehow aren't using
>      tor.
> 
>  2. `get plain bridges`
>          I think this one is bad because people might assume that this one is
>      somehow plaintext, especially if the string were to be translated.
> 
> Do you have a better suggestion for what to call "vanilla bridges"?
> 

I think "bridges" works just fine for "vanilla bridges" and I want to
take the opportunity to +1 Philipp's idea on looking for keywords
instead of commands, regardless of how they're phrased.

For instance, if someone emails BridgeDB with "please send me some
bridges" it should reply with a list of "vanilla bridges". or if someone
emailed the word "obfs" and nothing else, the bot should return a list
of obfs3 bridges.

PS: why are we still shipping obfs2 bridges?!

Bests,
-- 
Nima
0XC009DB191C92A77B | @nimaaa | mrphs

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right
to say it" --Evelyn Beatrice Hall

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