-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 Roger Dingledine:
Hi Colin,
Hi Roger / all,
I had a good chat last week with one of the volunteers that you recrui ted some months ago to help with the helpdesk. He told me that he wasn't answering tickets anymore, since it is just a deluge of tickets, mostl y the same over and over, and without any feedback mechanisms from the helpdesk to the other support pieces (faq, stackexchange, etc) and dev teams, there isn't really an end in sight.
This is currently accurate. Outside of reporting UX issues on Trac, and possibly adding items to the FAQ, there is no mechanism for support staff to spread the help-desk information more widely. A lot of the tickets we see are what I would consider "basics", and things that would be covered by the user manual (if it was available to users in an updated / usable way). This is a big part of why I think getting that finished would be a useful step forward for providing support to users, especially if it could be presented in some way that users encountered it without much hunting.
I suspect I agree with him -- taking a step back, it seems wise for us to enumerate our support mechanisms, and try to prioritize and triage so we do what is most scalable and most sustainable.
I generally agree here. Currently for support mechanisms, these are what I am aware of: 1: Help-Desks (RequestTracker) 2. Mailing lists (tor-talk, etc..) 3. IRC (#tor) 4. StackExchange 5. FAQ 6. General documentation on the website 7. Man pages
That said, I don't think many of us have a good handle on where the helpdesk is right now. So it's hard for us to know where it should fit in this triaging.
Can you summarize for us how many tickets it's getting, how many (and which) people are active, whether most tickets are getting answered (and after how long), what languages they're in, and whatever other questions I ought to be asking?
I will put out more precise numbers tomorrow and update the list, however I am fairly certain at this point I am the only person answering tickets in English, however its possible that Alison may still be answering tickets as well (will check on this when I retrieve the numbers). This is obviously not sustainable / ideal, regardless of if its 1 or 2 of us. We still have semi-active people answering tickets in Farsi, French and Chinese. I believe the volunteers that were recruited a few months ago were quickly overwhelmed with the number of tickets we receive; which in hindsight, is not surprising. Unfortunately, based on how the previous recruitment went, I do not think the same type of plan will be successful in the long-term. I've been working on a plan to make the support team more sustainable, however figuring out the best way to offer direct user support has been proving tricky. I believe its an important service, and one that cannot be replaced by public mechanisms like IRC and open mailing lists. My hope, is that there may be ways that we can make users reliance on the help-desk less, so that the help-desk can go back to being used for when users require the 1-on-1 support it can provide, when operating normally . Tomorrow I will clean up the portions of the plan that I think I have figured out, and send it to this list for review. Currently, this plan includes cleaning up certain pieces of documentation (like the manual, and relay / HS guides), as well as trying to turn many of the template responses we use on RT into FAQ entries, or perhaps their own type of "support portal". I will also bump this thread with more exact numbers on tickets.
Then we will be in a better position to try to help you.
That would be great! Any suggestions are greatly appreciated / welcomed. Thanks! - -- Colin Childs Tor Project https://www.torproject.org Twitter: @Phoul -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJW353ZAAoJEJWQHABkmqq5Qf4QAKLoYnSKxSfQ7ARknevAyBQz U32LdZ07n30Do/FNYzCAM4amCeW61ESb0RnwPbOkgf0eFLLHcdGmCyWDrbAwiZOB vt2KbIEi8jvAZInW3ir6SkInS8KQOzcZJ6qTcakz3OtWKSQrD0juAuog5yGwTqul nGFXoASLQ3oepPcoYigOBX3p4j1y6SaDcnS0oWttxvtIYrp9BMzC4FqmcWv0zhJx rv0kcwBhIsZvt+3+08f42hU7QjGdn3QuUAKdhw17Cj/ffgJdKdO60fXGx/RXOxIT iOmtzbYvkJDNeOYXlI9FseeJdvi37P29nIGA0z7Kj7KTEWlvAt2mivB/F8HwAHaM Abr4iPBZfhHK6ESHTZsBJS4NTm4YUM7TE1ptw6SqX9/adr8QsWns2BZPpXMNBGjC cbXIMbP281ZAT0YDrgFtyo9uKAnIvhrcsx+I6GGoiCnm2mxeQ/lV9rhShcvtPCh7 RGvNy0btvERLwOEhjwc1lFib+7tIHe0tfqVHOboPPfS9XwPWtL7qnrs2M6JilegD YxZ2yNJJV+IkoOZFBCbMUaE6xXIKbBJSp4vuAepPsjOxoqhm2CzXd1fBh5jWW8I9 QvDz+V99jJZmSxF3c1taYXR8SNVtATk4ZwptVwZPcFWERSgU0f3cjthqoDv1/aX9 dOTI4DF3u6NPTUBZiSy4 =N/4R -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----