[tor-dev] Email Bridge Distributor Interactive Commands

[Israel Leiva]

Hi.

I support what Philipp and Nima say about keywords. The given commands
surely look simple for technical users, but what about non-technical users?
If the purpose of the distributor is to give info, and you're already
filtering emails to *try* to avoid fake requests (correct if i'm wrong),
then you may assume that if somebody sends you an email is because he/she
is requesting for info, and if the email contains "bridges", it's quite
possible he/she wants bridges, right? You could, for example, filter for
"transport" (ignoring case) and send a reply with info for all types,
explaining what they do, and let the user decide which one to use. You
could also send both ipv4 and ipv6 IPs when requesting bridges. And why not
sending a public key link in all the replies (except help)? IMHO, this
reduces the effort on the user side (this is how we're doing it on the
revamp GetTor project).

best,



2014-07-24 2:54 GMT-04:00 Nima Fatemi <nima at riseup.net>:

> 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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>
>


-- 
israel
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