[tor-project] State of tshirts for volunteers running Tor relays

[Moritz Bartl]

On 06/13/2016 12:43 AM, Kate wrote:
> I'm wondering if we could collect a bunch of Tor volunteers at the
> Seattle office and get a pizza and send out a bunch at the same time?
> 
> Willing to do about 100 here, but that involves shipping them here.
> However, I am more than willing.

At the moment it's not about a one-time action, and it's not about the
actual process of sending them either.

Like I said dozens of times, it is about _reacting_ to the mails that
come in. I do not understand what is so hard about sending people a
friendly auto-reply, letting them know that their emails have in fact
arrived, that this is a volunteer activity, and that we will eventually
get back to them and get them a shirt. That's all that most people
demand. It could also be stated on the website. Which by the way still
refers to Tor Weather, which is defunct and offline.
https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/tshirt.html

It is really tiring to explain this over and over again whenever someone
asks: Yes, it's a volunteer thing, yes, someone will eventually answer
your mail, it is not going to a black hole, yes, Tor Weather is dead and
yes, we know about it but still nobody bothered to update the references.

And, just in case people haven't noticed, most threads on tor-relays and
tor-talk do not see replies from Tor core members any more, which is a
shame. That particular thread that Sebastian refers to has been there
with many people wondering for way too long now without being answered.
No, I'm not going to do that any more, I think this thing can be easily
fixed, and all of it is not about gathering some volunteers to send out
shirts. Even though I agree with that idea, and have encouraged Juris to
do exactly that in the Berlin space. It has not happened, because the
problem is not "packing the shirts", the problem as I understand it is
that dealing with shirt requests is a painful interaction, you need to
write them back, ask for proper information like fingerprints and postal
mail addresses, the people don't know which shirts are actually
available, etc etc. -- the final step in the pipeline is pretty
optimized by now from what I've seen. See a photo from one day of
action: https://twitter.com/torservers/status/728329622740451329 All
these were packed, labelled and mailed within a day. And I think that
was all the shirts from the crowdfunding campaign, which did bring
properly formatted postal mail addresses. The requests coming in via
email do not.

-- 
Moritz Bartl
https://www.torservers.net/