[tor-reports] Some Observations from the Help Desk

[Moritz Bartl]

Hi Report reader,

In December, I handled the majority of the support tickets. See Runa's
report for numbers. [1]

Observations:

#1 Boy, together with reading all the Tor mailing lists this is
definitely a full time job.

#2 Most users are not very adept at describing their problems. I wanted
to keep notes on issues raised, but it turned out most of the tickets
would not have been particular helpful to Tor devs or other users so I
did not "log" any.

#3 I still should have kept logs, and I plan to do so this month. The
upcoming "Q&A Forum" [2] should make it easy for support to add both
questions and answers.

#4 After one month of answering tickets, I am not sure any more if it is
a good idea to let people register and ask questions in a public forum.
For one, in most cases, solving the user problem requires multiple
interactions, and the forum will end up filled with not very helpful
topics. Secondly, more important, users are not careful about their
identity. I don't know how to approach this, I guess we just have to try
it out and see.

#5 We should purge old RT tickets from time to time to get rid of all
the user identifying data.

[1]
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2013-January/000118.html
[2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5995

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