[tor-project] State of helpdesk?

[Colin Childs]

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Roger Dingledine:
> There's also Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and the blog comments:
> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2016WinterD
evMeeting/Notes/TakeBackCommunityChannels
> 
Ahh, great! I had forgotten about these avenues of offering support.

> Good thought on 'man pages' -- I just added that to the list on that
> wiki page.
> 
> We should think about which other ones we've missed.
> 
>> I will put out more precise numbers tomorrow and update the list,
> 
> Looking forward to it!
> 
To start, I was incorrect about who was still working on the help-desk.
It appears that Michael and Jason are still answering tickets, Thank you
to both of them for continuing to answer tickets over the last couple
months.

Here are some numbers:

Total tickets in queue: 4224[1][2]
Tickets answered since March 1st: 14
Tickets received today: 40

Assuming today is an average day (it appears to be), this would be
approx. 1200 tickets a month. At 1200 tickets a month, with 3 people
maintaining the help-desk, we would each need to take on 400 tickets per
month (each).

While this worked for a period when the help-desk was being run by paid
staff, it is clear that it is not continuing to work; which is
understandable. Answering 400 tickets in a month is an extreme time
commitment for a volunteer, and was on the higher end of what the paid
staff was able to accomplish when 100% of their time was spent on
answering requests.

In the next hour or so, I will be getting the "support plan" that I
mentioned previously onto this list. While this email likely sounds
bleak, hopefully the other one helps balance things out.


[1]: While this number is alarmingly high, it is not entirely accurate.
These tickets have not been pruned for spam, requests in non-English
languages, and duplicate tickets. My estimate, would be that 3000-ish
(likely fewer) of these tickets would be something we would / could
actually respond to.

[2]: When we started with the new volunteers in December, the queue was
cleared as the help-desk had been shut down for a period of time while
recruiting volunteers. So the 4224 number should not include any tickets
before the last week of 2015.

- -- 
Colin Childs
Tor Project
https://www.torproject.org
Twitter: @Phoul
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