Re: [tor-dev] Email Bridge Distributor Interactive Commands

Hi.

I support what Philipp and Nima say about keywords. The given commands surely look simple for technical users, but what about non-technical users? If the purpose of the distributor is to give info, and you're already filtering emails to *try* to avoid fake requests (correct if i'm wrong), then you may assume that if somebody sends you an email is because he/she is requesting for info, and if the email contains "bridges", it's quite possible he/she wants bridges, right? You could, for example, filter for "transport" (ignoring case) and send a reply with info for all types, explaining what they do, and let the user decide which one to use. You could also send both ipv4 and ipv6 IPs when requesting bridges. And why not sending a public key link in all the replies (except help)? IMHO, this reduces the effort on the user side (this is how we're doing it on the revamp GetTor project).

best,

2014-07-24 2:54 GMT-04:00 Nima Fatemi <nima@xxxxxxxxxx>:

isis:
[...]

>> Are some of our least technical users, many of whom have never even seen a
>> command line before and who may live in Sub-Saharan Africa or one of the
>> Stan countries with only a rudimentary knowledge of English going to
>> understand the difference between vanilla bridges and, say, chocolate almond
>> bridges? Wouldn't it be better to choose terms that at least translate into
>> something resembling what they actually mean?
>
> Noted. What to call bridges without any pluggable transports has been argued
> about for years, with the result that everyone ended up calling them different
> things all over the place, which I believe is worse.
>
> Eventually, everyone figured out what "obfsproxy" meant, even if they didn't
> understand how it worked, nor how to pronounce it. My hope is that a
> consistent usage of consistently confusing and untranslatable terminology will
> eventually produce predictable and steadily decreasing levels of user
> confusion.
>
> Should the interface say "get transport unhuggable", perhaps? The obvious
> choices were:
>
> Â1. `get tor bridges` / `get transport tor`
> Â Â Â Â ÂThis is no good because it could potentially cause users to
> Â Â Âerroneously think that pluggable transport bridges somehow aren't using
> Â Â Âtor.
>
> Â2. `get plain bridges`
> Â Â Â Â ÂI think this one is bad because people might assume that this one is
> Â Â Âsomehow plaintext, especially if the string were to be translated.
>
> Do you have a better suggestion for what to call "vanilla bridges"?
>

I think "bridges" works just fine for "vanilla bridges" and I want to
take the opportunity to +1 Philipp's idea on looking for keywords
instead of commands, regardless of how they're phrased.

For instance, if someone emails BridgeDB with "please send me some
bridges" it should reply with a list of "vanilla bridges". or if someone
emailed the word "obfs" and nothing else, the bot should return a list
of obfs3 bridges.

PS: why are we still shipping obfs2 bridges?!

Bests,
--
Nima
0XC009DB191C92A77B | @nimaaa | mrphs

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right
to say it" --Evelyn Beatrice Hall

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israel