[tor-talk] Are non-official projects welcome to Stackexchange Tor Q&A forum?

[Nick Mathewson]

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 5:23 PM, adrelanos <adrelanos at riseup.net> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Short version:
>
> Can I redirect Whonix users to Stackexchange Tor Q&A forum?
>
> Long version:
>
> There are many Tor related projects, which are non-official, such as
> Whonix, Liberte Linux, TorChat, etc.
>
> Can non-official projects redirect their users questions to the
> Stackexchange Tor Q&A forum? I mean, will those questions be accepted or
> will they get closed by the moderator?
>
> - I really like to see a Tor forum succeed.
> - I am not eager to run a separate Whonix forum.
> - The Tor support team is free to ignore those questions.
> - The Tor support team (and anyone else) is free to point out that these
> projects are non-official and unsupported.


Hi!

So, we chatted about it a little, and we're not 100% actually sure
what the right answer should be there. We don't mind general questions
about other Tor-related projects, but we'd like to avoid having that
stuff ramp up faster than the Tor questions.  Also we're also worried
that if we say 'yeah, sure, go ahead' then we'll get swamped with
support requests for stuff like "tormail," or the next Haystack, or
that it's going to turn into a promotional vehicle for somebody with a
forked Tor called tOr, or some drama like that.

On the other hand, I don't want to have people decline to answer
questions like "What are all my options for a Tor-based operating
system?" or "How can I transparently proxy traffic to Tor on Windows".
 So we need a good answer here, and I don't know what it is.

How about we this: Let's all try to make an honest effort to *focus*
on stuff that Tor releases for now, answer relevant questions for
other Tor-related stuff as it shows up, and revisit this in a little
while, once we see how it goes?

Everybody's still working out how we want to use this, and it's only
going to work out if it has a happy, engaged community.  That means
IMO we should avoid making and avoid looking for Big Policy
Pronouncements, and lean towards decisions of the form "let's try X
for now and see how it works out".

At least, that's how I'd go.  It's not actually my call, and I'm not
currently moderating it, but I don't think that's a crazy approach for
now.

best wishes,
-- 
Nick