We have many comments on our blog that are unrelated to the respective blog post but still bring up reasonable topics. To make it easier for our users to be heard, why not have an "anything goes" blog post once a month? A user suggested this idea over here: https://blog.torproject.org/comment/288185#comment-288185
The idea is for users to comment on any topic as long as it's not in violation of our blog comment policy (minus the "on topic" requirement): https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/community/blog-comment-policy Hopefully, this will give our users an opportunity to talk about problems they have, ask us questions, and request features.
How does that sound? I can draft the blog post and help moderate comments but would appreciate a few people helping with that. I propose June 26th -- the last Friday this month. I suggest giving it a shot as a one-off experiment and repeat if it goes well.
Cheers, Philipp
Hi Philipp,
Thanks for proposing this!
I'm afraid relying on Drupal comments is not smart here: - moderation is sad - the interface does not have a useful UI for track replies - people behind the second page get lost under the pagination - and more :/
My first fear is that this will land in a bottleneck for you or any other who is handling comments (like it always happens when we write a blogpost) becoming a full-time support job.
What I'm thinking now is, what is your idea about the immediate next action after you read that feature request or issues? Are you planning to open tickets in Gitlab manually? Are we willing to use upvotes to prioritize itemson our roadmaps? Should we encourage users to open tickets? Should we share a RT account with more people to learn more about which daily issues users are facing?
I still remember the idea of having a forum for this community, which is something we can always discuss.
That said, I'm curious about how this "support desk" idea will grow.
Thanks,
A
On 6/17/20 2:45 p. m., Philipp Winter wrote:
We have many comments on our blog that are unrelated to the respective blog post but still bring up reasonable topics. To make it easier for our users to be heard, why not have an "anything goes" blog post once a month? A user suggested this idea over here: https://blog.torproject.org/comment/288185#comment-288185
The idea is for users to comment on any topic as long as it's not in violation of our blog comment policy (minus the "on topic" requirement): https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/community/blog-comment-policy Hopefully, this will give our users an opportunity to talk about problems they have, ask us questions, and request features.
How does that sound? I can draft the blog post and help moderate comments but would appreciate a few people helping with that. I propose June 26th -- the last Friday this month. I suggest giving it a shot as a one-off experiment and repeat if it goes well.
Cheers, Philipp _______________________________________________ tor-project mailing list tor-project@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-project
On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 03:23:11PM -0300, Antonela Debiasi wrote:
Hi Philipp,
Thanks for proposing this!
I'm afraid relying on Drupal comments is not smart here: - moderation is sad - the interface does not have a useful UI for track replies - people behind the second page get lost under the pagination - and more :/
My first fear is that this will land in a bottleneck for you or any other who is handling comments (like it always happens when we write a blogpost) becoming a full-time support job.
What I'm thinking now is, what is your idea about the immediate next action after you read that feature request or issues? Are you planning to open tickets in Gitlab manually? Are we willing to use upvotes to prioritize itemson our roadmaps? Should we encourage users to open tickets? Should we share a RT account with more people to learn more about which daily issues users are facing?
Sadly, this is the status quo. With Tor Browser, we open a ticket when someone reports a bug or they request a new feature - as a result, Tor Browser has many, many open tickets. I did this yesterday (as an example):
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40007 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40008
Regarding how we prioritize these issues/requests - that is a very good question.
I still remember the idea of having a forum for this community, which is something we can always discuss.
We receive requests for this in blog comments frequently, too. I'm not sure we are in a good situation, right now, to moderate a forum for Tor users, though. Maybe, instead, Gitlab can provide some missing/needed support functionality.
On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 10:45:33AM -0700, Philipp Winter wrote:
We have many comments on our blog that are unrelated to the respective blog post but still bring up reasonable topics. To make it easier for our users to be heard, why not have an "anything goes" blog post once a month? A user suggested this idea over here: https://blog.torproject.org/comment/288185#comment-288185
The idea is for users to comment on any topic as long as it's not in violation of our blog comment policy (minus the "on topic" requirement): https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/community/blog-comment-policy Hopefully, this will give our users an opportunity to talk about problems they have, ask us questions, and request features.
How does that sound? I can draft the blog post and help moderate comments but would appreciate a few people helping with that. I propose June 26th -- the last Friday this month. I suggest giving it a shot as a one-off experiment and repeat if it goes well.
I agree with Antonela that Drupal blog comments are not an ideal medium (putting it nicely) for an interaction like this with other people. However, we don't have a better platform right now, and this is important, so I agree trying this as a one-off experiment is worth the (potential) pain. I can help you with this.
On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 1:45 PM Philipp Winter phw@torproject.org wrote:
We have many comments on our blog that are unrelated to the respective blog post but still bring up reasonable topics. To make it easier for our users to be heard, why not have an "anything goes" blog post once a month? A user suggested this idea over here: https://blog.torproject.org/comment/288185#comment-288185
The idea is for users to comment on any topic as long as it's not in violation of our blog comment policy (minus the "on topic" requirement): https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/community/blog-comment-policy Hopefully, this will give our users an opportunity to talk about problems they have, ask us questions, and request features.
How does that sound? I can draft the blog post and help moderate comments but would appreciate a few people helping with that. I propose June 26th -- the last Friday this month. I suggest giving it a shot as a one-off experiment and repeat if it goes well.
Interesting!
Here are some things that I think might make this work better:
* Actually plan to do this again in the future -- or something like it. We can't really call it a "once only" and expect to tell people "okay, we're never doing this again" and _not_ have that derail the whole conversation. Maybe we should instead
* We should have a pre-announced close date for this thread.
* I don't think "anything goes" is necessarily what we want to call it. Maybe "anything tor related" or "Open Post"? "Anything goes" kind of implies that we won't moderate anything at all for any reason.
* We'll need several people willing to be moderating and responding to stuff, probably in shifts.
[SHIFTING TOPICS]
I think we need to look at our moderation policy again. Right now, every post's comments are moderated by the post's author, or somebody they designate. This makes our moderation policies inconsistent: I delete everything that is not on-topic, but that captures a fair amount of people expecting me to have an off-topic conversation because some other thread allowed it.
OTOH, I feel that I _need_ to block off-topic stuff from threads I'm moderating, since if I don't, I sure don't have time to respond to it. If I put it on, then my understanding of our current blog comment policy is that I need to make sure somebody engages with it. I'm better off deleting everything that isn't on-topic.
I'm not sure what the answer is. I could turn off comments on all the posts I make, but as we've found out, that just makes everybody else's posts get full of comments about how my posts are locked down.
Maybe we need to see if we can spin up a cross-post moderation team for the blog? I'm not sure.
peace,
On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 10:45:33AM -0700, Philipp Winter wrote:
We have many comments on our blog that are unrelated to the respective blog post but still bring up reasonable topics. To make it easier for our users to be heard, why not have an "anything goes" blog post once a month? A user suggested this idea over here: https://blog.torproject.org/comment/288185#comment-288185
The idea is for users to comment on any topic as long as it's not in violation of our blog comment policy (minus the "on topic" requirement): https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/community/blog-comment-policy Hopefully, this will give our users an opportunity to talk about problems they have, ask us questions, and request features.
At Today's Tor Browser meeting we discussed the need for (additional) blog comment moderators. The responsibility of approving and responding to pending comments generally falls onto whoever writes/publishes a blog post, but some groups have a better process for this than others. We can think about creating a more formalized process for this, maybe with rotating responsibilities, unfortunately we are faced with two (hard) facts:
1) The number of paid individuals who can spend time on supporting Tor's operations/responsibilities/goals is smaller than it was two months ago. We should expect some tasks must be reduced/cut, and maybe moderating blog comments should be one of them.
2) Drupal's blog comment system is terrible for supporting reports from people about bugs or feature requests. We get stack traces and console messages without context, vague descriptions of crashes and UI bugs, and opinions about Tor's politics.
I know real bugs are reported through blog comments, and anonymous comments make Tor Browser (and other Tor projects) better. This is a fact, too. However, the overhead required for finding the signal in the noise is significant, and this is especially true now with fewer people around.
One proposed solution is we agree that all blog posts are published with closed/hidden comments except the once-per-month "open" blog post. This requires an agreement because experience showed that closing comments on one post but allowing comments on another results in people submitting their questions/comments/bug-reports on whatever blog post allows comment, regardless of topic.
One longer term solution involves integrating a feedback mechanism into Tor Browser (like Whisperback, SecureDrop, GlobaLeaks, etc), but we can't work on something like this any time soon and we need an immediate solution for this comment moderation problem.
Supporting users of our projects is an on-going challenge and we have varying degrees of success (and media) from IRC, to blog comments, to RT, to Twitter...
Maybe centralizing and time-bounding the comments we must watch will help us be more successful (or, maybe it'll be worse).
Thoughts, arguments for/against?
Thanks, Matt
On 2020-06-22 20:46:23, Matthew Finkel wrote:
On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 10:45:33AM -0700, Philipp Winter wrote:
We have many comments on our blog that are unrelated to the respective blog post but still bring up reasonable topics. To make it easier for our users to be heard, why not have an "anything goes" blog post once a month? A user suggested this idea over here: https://blog.torproject.org/comment/288185#comment-288185
The idea is for users to comment on any topic as long as it's not in violation of our blog comment policy (minus the "on topic" requirement): https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/community/blog-comment-policy Hopefully, this will give our users an opportunity to talk about problems they have, ask us questions, and request features.
At Today's Tor Browser meeting we discussed the need for (additional) blog comment moderators. The responsibility of approving and responding to pending comments generally falls onto whoever writes/publishes a blog post, but some groups have a better process for this than others. We can think about creating a more formalized process for this, maybe with rotating responsibilities, unfortunately we are faced with two (hard) facts:
- The number of paid individuals who can spend time on supporting Tor's
operations/responsibilities/goals is smaller than it was two months ago. We should expect some tasks must be reduced/cut, and maybe moderating blog comments should be one of them.
- Drupal's blog comment system is terrible for supporting reports from
people about bugs or feature requests. We get stack traces and console messages without context, vague descriptions of crashes and UI bugs, and opinions about Tor's politics.
I know real bugs are reported through blog comments, and anonymous comments make Tor Browser (and other Tor projects) better. This is a fact, too. However, the overhead required for finding the signal in the noise is significant, and this is especially true now with fewer people around.
One proposed solution is we agree that all blog posts are published with closed/hidden comments except the once-per-month "open" blog post. This requires an agreement because experience showed that closing comments on one post but allowing comments on another results in people submitting their questions/comments/bug-reports on whatever blog post allows comment, regardless of topic.
One longer term solution involves integrating a feedback mechanism into Tor Browser (like Whisperback, SecureDrop, GlobaLeaks, etc), but we can't work on something like this any time soon and we need an immediate solution for this comment moderation problem.
Supporting users of our projects is an on-going challenge and we have varying degrees of success (and media) from IRC, to blog comments, to RT, to Twitter...
Maybe centralizing and time-bounding the comments we must watch will help us be more successful (or, maybe it'll be worse).
Thoughts, arguments for/against?
I would like to bring back the idea of using Discourse as a replacement for all our support channels (RT, blog comments, and other feedback/support systems). It has a nice system to promote community members as moderators while still giving us the ability to have the final call on content (as administrators).
This would be a nice way of reducing the number of services (Drupal and RT) at the cost of possibly creating a new more complicated one (Discourse) or trusting a third-party provider (Discourse.net, although we already do that with Drupal).
It would also allow us to switch to a fully static website for the blog, naturally. It would also address the problem of "how do I get an account on GitLab to file a bug report" (for which the answer would be: you don't, go on discourse for now and we'll do the triage).
A.
On 22/06/20, Antoine Beaupré wrote:
I would like to bring back the idea of using Discourse as a replacement for all our support channels (RT, blog comments, and other feedback/support systems). It has a nice system to promote community members as moderators while still giving us the ability to have the final call on content (as administrators).
Discourse is simple and nice to use compared to comments on a nice. Also, the idea of community moderators works well in that.
This would be a nice way of reducing the number of services (Drupal and RT) at the cost of possibly creating a new more complicated one (Discourse) or trusting a third-party provider (Discourse.net, although we already do that with Drupal).
Discourse is also helping a few other non profits by hosting for free.
It would also allow us to switch to a fully static website for the blog, naturally. It would also address the problem of "how do I get an account on GitLab to file a bug report" (for which the answer would be: you don't, go on discourse for now and we'll do the triage).
Static blog will also reduce the maintainance burden.
Kushal
Antoine Beaupré anarcat@torproject.org writes:
On 2020-06-22 20:46:23, Matthew Finkel wrote:
On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 10:45:33AM -0700, Philipp Winter wrote:
We have many comments on our blog that are unrelated to the respective blog post but still bring up reasonable topics. To make it easier for our users to be heard, why not have an "anything goes" blog post once a month? A user suggested this idea over here: https://blog.torproject.org/comment/288185#comment-288185
The idea is for users to comment on any topic as long as it's not in violation of our blog comment policy (minus the "on topic" requirement): https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/community/blog-comment-policy Hopefully, this will give our users an opportunity to talk about problems they have, ask us questions, and request features.
<snip>
I would like to bring back the idea of using Discourse as a replacement for all our support channels (RT, blog comments, and other feedback/support systems). It has a nice system to promote community members as moderators while still giving us the ability to have the final call on content (as administrators).
Hello. I would like to +9000 this suggestion by anarcat. I think supporting discourse is a pretty fantastic improvement over our current support channels. I don't know what should happen to our current support channels if we get discourse, but I know I would like Tor discourse to exist and I would be happy to participate in such an experiment.
The [tor-relays] mailing list might have been a cool support forum 15 years ago but I think nowdays people would prefer a more modern interface to getting support and love. Staying frozen in old-sk00l mediums like IRC and mailing lists severely limits the parts of our community who is not used to such ancient technology (and that part will only keep growing as time move forwards as it usually does).
Cheers! :)
On 24/06/20, George Kadianakis wrote:
The [tor-relays] mailing list might have been a cool support forum 15 years ago but I think nowdays people would prefer a more modern interface to getting support and love. Staying frozen in old-sk00l mediums like IRC and mailing lists severely limits the parts of our community who is not used to such ancient technology (and that part will only keep growing as time move forwards as it usually does).
Discourse will be a great add as the support platform, but we should make sure to keep the mailing lists alive for the real disucssion. As many of the Python folks already found the similar issue in the discuss.python.org. While it has a much newer interface, but may not be that great of an interface while tracking any large discussion.
Also, is there any plan to move to Mailman3 for our mailing lists? It has a much nicer web interface and other useful updates.
Kushal
On 2020-06-24 11:17:03, Kushal Das wrote:
On 24/06/20, George Kadianakis wrote:
The [tor-relays] mailing list might have been a cool support forum 15 years ago but I think nowdays people would prefer a more modern interface to getting support and love. Staying frozen in old-sk00l mediums like IRC and mailing lists severely limits the parts of our community who is not used to such ancient technology (and that part will only keep growing as time move forwards as it usually does).
Discourse will be a great add as the support platform, but we should make sure to keep the mailing lists alive for the real disucssion. As many of the Python folks already found the similar issue in the discuss.python.org. While it has a much newer interface, but may not be that great of an interface while tracking any large discussion.
Just to be real clear here: I did not think of replacing mailing lists at all when I mentioned discourse. I only thought of forums already established on the web, namely the blog, GitLab, and RT, to a lesser extent. At least "support stuff", for which I don't immediately think of mailing lists.
But you (George) are right: Discourse could attempt to replace mailing lists, or at least some. I would be very careful about this, however. As Kushal mentioned, some groups have tried this and have only been moderately successful. In Debian, in particular, there was a significant backlash from mailing lists users frustrated by the sub-optimal email workflow provided by Discourse. It's not just a maillig list drop-in replacement...
That said.
Also, is there any plan to move to Mailman3 for our mailing lists? It has a much nicer web interface and other useful updates.
Not that I am aware of, but we *will* have to make that jump eventually, probably when Debian releases "bullseye", the next stable release. Mailman 2 runs on Python 2 and is technically already EOL, although I suspect that Debian, along with basically all other Linux distributions, will be stuck maintaining Python 2 and Mailman 2 for security updates for one last cycle.
But after that, yes, we'd have to migrate to Mailman 3. And yes, the interface is much, much better. I would also argue the (technical and graphic) design is simpler and better, although there are some functionality (like "invite") still missing. It's not a trivial upgrade but a migration, if I remember correctly:
https://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/migration.html
But yes, that will need to happen eventually. I wouldn't hold my breath, however, and wait until we get Mailman 3 to address the moderation problems. Fundamentally, it is still the same moderation system as a mailing list in that (for example) there's one or few moderator per list, and Discourse is a radical (and interesting, IMHO) shift from that, in many other ways.
A.
On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 11:17:03AM +0530, Kushal Das wrote:
On 24/06/20, George Kadianakis wrote:
The [tor-relays] mailing list might have been a cool support forum 15 years ago but I think nowdays people would prefer a more modern interface to getting support and love. Staying frozen in old-sk00l mediums like IRC and mailing lists severely limits the parts of our community who is not used to such ancient technology (and that part will only keep growing as time move forwards as it usually does).
Discourse will be a great add as the support platform, but we should make sure to keep the mailing lists alive for the real disucssion. As many of the Python folks already found the similar issue in the discuss.python.org. While it has a much newer interface, but may not be that great of an interface while tracking any large discussion.
Also, is there any plan to move to Mailman3 for our mailing lists? It has a much nicer web interface and other useful updates.
Kushal
Public Interest Technologist, Freedom of the Press Foundation CPython Core Developer Director, Python Software Foundation https://kushaldas.in _______________________________________________ tor-project mailing list tor-project@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-project
As a comment platform to replace our Drupal comments system, Discourse looks great. I'm also looking forward to use this forum to follow up with partners in our digital security trainings.
But, as a replacement to all our support platforms I don't think Discourse is enough. One thing is a helpdesk tool, where we use templates, assign tickets to other person, have a review process, have automatic actions to reply users, and the other is a forum platform.
There are many cases that users need to contact us by email, for example, when torproject.org domain and subdomains are blocked and they need to configure their bridges, or bridges are offline, or how to fix their Tor Browser.
We have other cases for RT that is also used for Donations, Press requests. I'd like to understand how these RT queues would fit inside the Discourse proposal.
best, Gus
On 2020-06-24 10:39:42, gus wrote:
On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 11:17:03AM +0530, Kushal Das wrote:
On 24/06/20, George Kadianakis wrote:
The [tor-relays] mailing list might have been a cool support forum 15 years ago but I think nowdays people would prefer a more modern interface to getting support and love. Staying frozen in old-sk00l mediums like IRC and mailing lists severely limits the parts of our community who is not used to such ancient technology (and that part will only keep growing as time move forwards as it usually does).
Discourse will be a great add as the support platform, but we should make sure to keep the mailing lists alive for the real disucssion. As many of the Python folks already found the similar issue in the discuss.python.org. While it has a much newer interface, but may not be that great of an interface while tracking any large discussion.
Also, is there any plan to move to Mailman3 for our mailing lists? It has a much nicer web interface and other useful updates.
Kushal
Public Interest Technologist, Freedom of the Press Foundation CPython Core Developer Director, Python Software Foundation https://kushaldas.in _______________________________________________ tor-project mailing list tor-project@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-project
As a comment platform to replace our Drupal comments system, Discourse looks great. I'm also looking forward to use this forum to follow up with partners in our digital security trainings.
But, as a replacement to all our support platforms I don't think Discourse is enough. One thing is a helpdesk tool, where we use templates, assign tickets to other person, have a review process, have automatic actions to reply users, and the other is a forum platform.
There are many cases that users need to contact us by email, for example, when torproject.org domain and subdomains are blocked and they need to configure their bridges, or bridges are offline, or how to fix their Tor Browser.
We have other cases for RT that is also used for Donations, Press requests. I'd like to understand how these RT queues would fit inside the Discourse proposal.
That's a good point. I'm not sure how or if Discourse could handle private requests like this.
A.
On 22 Jun (16:59:22), Antoine Beaupré wrote:
On 2020-06-22 20:46:23, Matthew Finkel wrote:
On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 10:45:33AM -0700, Philipp Winter wrote:
We have many comments on our blog that are unrelated to the respective blog post but still bring up reasonable topics. To make it easier for our users to be heard, why not have an "anything goes" blog post once a month? A user suggested this idea over here: https://blog.torproject.org/comment/288185#comment-288185
The idea is for users to comment on any topic as long as it's not in violation of our blog comment policy (minus the "on topic" requirement): https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/community/blog-comment-policy Hopefully, this will give our users an opportunity to talk about problems they have, ask us questions, and request features.
At Today's Tor Browser meeting we discussed the need for (additional) blog comment moderators. The responsibility of approving and responding to pending comments generally falls onto whoever writes/publishes a blog post, but some groups have a better process for this than others. We can think about creating a more formalized process for this, maybe with rotating responsibilities, unfortunately we are faced with two (hard) facts:
- The number of paid individuals who can spend time on supporting Tor's
operations/responsibilities/goals is smaller than it was two months ago. We should expect some tasks must be reduced/cut, and maybe moderating blog comments should be one of them.
- Drupal's blog comment system is terrible for supporting reports from
people about bugs or feature requests. We get stack traces and console messages without context, vague descriptions of crashes and UI bugs, and opinions about Tor's politics.
I know real bugs are reported through blog comments, and anonymous comments make Tor Browser (and other Tor projects) better. This is a fact, too. However, the overhead required for finding the signal in the noise is significant, and this is especially true now with fewer people around.
One proposed solution is we agree that all blog posts are published with closed/hidden comments except the once-per-month "open" blog post. This requires an agreement because experience showed that closing comments on one post but allowing comments on another results in people submitting their questions/comments/bug-reports on whatever blog post allows comment, regardless of topic.
One longer term solution involves integrating a feedback mechanism into Tor Browser (like Whisperback, SecureDrop, GlobaLeaks, etc), but we can't work on something like this any time soon and we need an immediate solution for this comment moderation problem.
Supporting users of our projects is an on-going challenge and we have varying degrees of success (and media) from IRC, to blog comments, to RT, to Twitter...
Maybe centralizing and time-bounding the comments we must watch will help us be more successful (or, maybe it'll be worse).
Thoughts, arguments for/against?
I would like to bring back the idea of using Discourse as a replacement for all our support channels (RT, blog comments, and other feedback/support systems). It has a nice system to promote community members as moderators while still giving us the ability to have the final call on content (as administrators).
This would be a nice way of reducing the number of services (Drupal and RT) at the cost of possibly creating a new more complicated one (Discourse) or trusting a third-party provider (Discourse.net, although we already do that with Drupal).
It would also allow us to switch to a fully static website for the blog, naturally. It would also address the problem of "how do I get an account on GitLab to file a bug report" (for which the answer would be: you don't, go on discourse for now and we'll do the triage).
+1 on Discourse idea!
It is quite a step forward in tooling and possibilities! We've been using that at nsec.io to manage the capture the flag contest that has more than 750 people spread out over 80 teams and it is quite amazing to use.
Cheers! David
On 2020-06-22 16:59:22, Antoine Beaupré wrote:
On 2020-06-22 20:46:23, Matthew Finkel wrote:
On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 10:45:33AM -0700, Philipp Winter wrote:
We have many comments on our blog that are unrelated to the respective blog post but still bring up reasonable topics. To make it easier for our users to be heard, why not have an "anything goes" blog post once a month? A user suggested this idea over here: https://blog.torproject.org/comment/288185#comment-288185
The idea is for users to comment on any topic as long as it's not in violation of our blog comment policy (minus the "on topic" requirement): https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/community/blog-comment-policy Hopefully, this will give our users an opportunity to talk about problems they have, ask us questions, and request features.
At Today's Tor Browser meeting we discussed the need for (additional) blog comment moderators. The responsibility of approving and responding to pending comments generally falls onto whoever writes/publishes a blog post, but some groups have a better process for this than others. We can think about creating a more formalized process for this, maybe with rotating responsibilities, unfortunately we are faced with two (hard) facts:
- The number of paid individuals who can spend time on supporting Tor's
operations/responsibilities/goals is smaller than it was two months ago. We should expect some tasks must be reduced/cut, and maybe moderating blog comments should be one of them.
- Drupal's blog comment system is terrible for supporting reports from
people about bugs or feature requests. We get stack traces and console messages without context, vague descriptions of crashes and UI bugs, and opinions about Tor's politics.
I know real bugs are reported through blog comments, and anonymous comments make Tor Browser (and other Tor projects) better. This is a fact, too. However, the overhead required for finding the signal in the noise is significant, and this is especially true now with fewer people around.
One proposed solution is we agree that all blog posts are published with closed/hidden comments except the once-per-month "open" blog post. This requires an agreement because experience showed that closing comments on one post but allowing comments on another results in people submitting their questions/comments/bug-reports on whatever blog post allows comment, regardless of topic.
One longer term solution involves integrating a feedback mechanism into Tor Browser (like Whisperback, SecureDrop, GlobaLeaks, etc), but we can't work on something like this any time soon and we need an immediate solution for this comment moderation problem.
Supporting users of our projects is an on-going challenge and we have varying degrees of success (and media) from IRC, to blog comments, to RT, to Twitter...
Maybe centralizing and time-bounding the comments we must watch will help us be more successful (or, maybe it'll be worse).
Thoughts, arguments for/against?
I would like to bring back the idea of using Discourse as a replacement for all our support channels (RT, blog comments, and other feedback/support systems). It has a nice system to promote community members as moderators while still giving us the ability to have the final call on content (as administrators).
This would be a nice way of reducing the number of services (Drupal and RT) at the cost of possibly creating a new more complicated one (Discourse) or trusting a third-party provider (Discourse.net, although we already do that with Drupal).
It would also allow us to switch to a fully static website for the blog, naturally. It would also address the problem of "how do I get an account on GitLab to file a bug report" (for which the answer would be: you don't, go on discourse for now and we'll do the triage).
I will also mention in passing that we have done some tests on a trial instances from the discourse.net people, of which the results are documented here:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/blog/-/issues/6
Your comments there would be welcome, in case there's something I missed in there...
a.
On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 4:46 PM Matthew Finkel sysrqb@torproject.org wrote:
On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 10:45:33AM -0700, Philipp Winter wrote:
We have many comments on our blog that are unrelated to the respective blog post but still bring up reasonable topics. To make it easier for our users to be heard, why not have an "anything goes" blog post once a month? A user suggested this idea over here: https://blog.torproject.org/comment/288185#comment-288185
The idea is for users to comment on any topic as long as it's not in violation of our blog comment policy (minus the "on topic" requirement): https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/community/blog-comment-policy Hopefully, this will give our users an opportunity to talk about problems they have, ask us questions, and request features.
At Today's Tor Browser meeting we discussed the need for (additional) blog comment moderators. The responsibility of approving and responding to pending comments generally falls onto whoever writes/publishes a blog post, but some groups have a better process for this than others. We can think about creating a more formalized process for this, maybe with rotating responsibilities, unfortunately we are faced with two (hard) facts:
- The number of paid individuals who can spend time on supporting Tor's
operations/responsibilities/goals is smaller than it was two months ago. We should expect some tasks must be reduced/cut, and maybe moderating blog comments should be one of them.
- Drupal's blog comment system is terrible for supporting reports from
people about bugs or feature requests. We get stack traces and console messages without context, vague descriptions of crashes and UI bugs, and opinions about Tor's politics.
I know real bugs are reported through blog comments, and anonymous comments make Tor Browser (and other Tor projects) better. This is a fact, too. However, the overhead required for finding the signal in the noise is significant, and this is especially true now with fewer people around.
One proposed solution is we agree that all blog posts are published with closed/hidden comments except the once-per-month "open" blog post. This requires an agreement because experience showed that closing comments on one post but allowing comments on another results in people submitting their questions/comments/bug-reports on whatever blog post allows comment, regardless of topic.
I'll be thinking aloud here, so please don't take my thoughts as final or deep. :)
It seems to me that the moderation burden scales about linearly with the number of comments -- but so does the usefulness of the blog. If putting all the comments in one place produces more discussion, it will make the blog better -- but I'm not sure that doing so will actually reduce the moderation burden.
I also think we may be conflating the burden of moderation work with the burden of communications work. Moderating can be as simple as "delete everything that isn't about the topic of the post." But in practice, responding to the on-topic stuff as needed can take a much greater amount of time.
I think that the communications burden might be even higher for an "open" post -- the more topics are on-topic, the more people potentially need to answer them.
One thing I do agree with is that the moderation/communication burden is not spread evenly. For example, because I moderate comments on my Tor release posts more strictly than the TB people do, they bear a higher burden than I do, whereas folks who block comments entirely have no moderation or communications burden at all. (See my last email on this topic for more.)
If we still think that open threads might be a good idea (and I do think they would be, if we plan them well), I think that we might have a better sense of what we want to do with comments on _other_ threads after we have open threads working. Whatever system we come up with to moderate open threads and respond to users on them might scale just as easily to the other posts, or it might not. Similarly, the presence of open threads might mean fewer off-topic comments show up on other posts?
So my suggestion at this point is that we move ahead with trying to figure out how we would get a monthly "open post" would work, and seeing what we can do for our next steps after that.
(Also, for reporting issues, I am looking forward to ahf's "gitlab lobby" feature, to enable people to report issues on the web without having to get gitlab accounts. https://gitlab.torproject.org/ahf/lobby is the WIP if I understand right.)
all best wishes,
tor-project@lists.torproject.org
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Antoine Beaupré -
Antonela Debiasi -
David Goulet -
George Kadianakis -
gus -
Kushal Das -
Matthew Finkel -
Nick Mathewson -
Nick Mathewson -
Philipp Winter