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