State of tshirts for volunteers running Tor relays
Hi, is there anyone who can shed some light on who is currently sending out shirts for volunteers, what their status is, etc? It seems this has completely grinded to a halt with the fundraising campaign, which is a real shame. Should we stop promising shirts to people who run relays? Is there a shortage? People on tor-relays have claimed that they're now waiting 7 months for their shirt. It's totally understandable if people are buried with work, but there's just no information about whether we even have anyone who is supposed to be doing the work right now. Thanks for any kind of feedback on this Sebastian
Sebastian Hahn:
I'm guessing that in the effort to get the fundraising t-shirts out that we haven't been able to send people t-shirts for running relays. We've been doing our best, but we've been forced to neglect our relay operators. For months, sad and dejected volunteers have mentioned this. To our friends, a Tor t-shirt is more than a t-shirt. Also, without our relay operators, we kind of have a problem. They are our people, they operate the Tor network, and their morale is important. I think we should send tor relay operators t-shirts and tuck stickers into them as well--I think this is very important for reinforcing our commitment to our community. I'm wondering if we could collect a bunch of Tor volunteers at the Seattle office and get a pizza and send out a bunch at the same time? Willing to do about 100 here, but that involves shipping them here. However, I am more than willing. How many do we need to send? How can we figure that out? --Katie
On 06/13/2016 12:43 AM, Kate wrote:
At the moment it's not about a one-time action, and it's not about the actual process of sending them either. Like I said dozens of times, it is about _reacting_ to the mails that come in. I do not understand what is so hard about sending people a friendly auto-reply, letting them know that their emails have in fact arrived, that this is a volunteer activity, and that we will eventually get back to them and get them a shirt. That's all that most people demand. It could also be stated on the website. Which by the way still refers to Tor Weather, which is defunct and offline. https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/tshirt.html It is really tiring to explain this over and over again whenever someone asks: Yes, it's a volunteer thing, yes, someone will eventually answer your mail, it is not going to a black hole, yes, Tor Weather is dead and yes, we know about it but still nobody bothered to update the references. And, just in case people haven't noticed, most threads on tor-relays and tor-talk do not see replies from Tor core members any more, which is a shame. That particular thread that Sebastian refers to has been there with many people wondering for way too long now without being answered. No, I'm not going to do that any more, I think this thing can be easily fixed, and all of it is not about gathering some volunteers to send out shirts. Even though I agree with that idea, and have encouraged Juris to do exactly that in the Berlin space. It has not happened, because the problem is not "packing the shirts", the problem as I understand it is that dealing with shirt requests is a painful interaction, you need to write them back, ask for proper information like fingerprints and postal mail addresses, the people don't know which shirts are actually available, etc etc. -- the final step in the pipeline is pretty optimized by now from what I've seen. See a photo from one day of action: https://twitter.com/torservers/status/728329622740451329 All these were packed, labelled and mailed within a day. And I think that was all the shirts from the crowdfunding campaign, which did bring properly formatted postal mail addresses. The requests coming in via email do not. -- Moritz Bartl https://www.torservers.net/
(nb: None of this is directed at the person I'm replying to, or anyone in particular. It's more a general rant, filled with hyperbole and general jaded weariness, that should be ignored.) On Mon, 13 Jun 2016 00:55:30 +0200 Moritz Bartl <moritz@torservers.net> wrote:
Practically speaking it's yet another thing that is "simple" to do technically, that doesn't have anyone to do it. Where does tshirt@torproject.org go to right now?
FWIW, I try to reply to things on tor-relays@ when I can contribute usefully. Likewise tor-dev@, likewise this list, likewise any other list that I'm subscribed to, or trac. I have no concrete understanding of how t-shirts work, so I don't normally reply to such things. ISTR something about a more moderated tor-talk@ list, that may draw more people to participate again. I guess with random drama recently[0] that got abandoned. Skimming the archives for this month, it's not something I personally want to be subscribed to[1].
The initial thread was reasonable and if I had known how the t-shirt process worked, I would have replied. The latter half of said thread just makes me depressed, and want to unsubscribe from the list. The problem I'm *personally* having with community interaction lately is that, generally speaking I have a finite amount of mental bandwidth available during any given time period. Replying to mailing list threads (a non-trivial fraction of which slowly chip away at whatever minscule faith in humanity I have left) is in direct competition for said mental bandwidth with things like "doing developer stuff". Regards, -- Yawning Angel [0]: ... That I'm explicitly trying to avoid. [1]: I'd even still help moderate that, since at least my suffering would be making the world a better place, rather than just slowing driving me more insane with no net benefit.
participants (4)
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Kate -
Moritz Bartl -
Sebastian Hahn -
Yawning Angel