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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