Re: [tor-bugs] #3592 [Website]: lack of web forums

["Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki" <torproject-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

#3592: lack of web forums
----------------------------+-----------------------------------------------
    Reporter:  cypherpunks  |       Owner:  phobos  
        Type:  defect       |      Status:  reopened
    Priority:  normal       |   Milestone:          
   Component:  Website      |     Version:          
  Resolution:               |    Keywords:          
      Parent:               |      Points:          
Actualpoints:               |  
----------------------------+-----------------------------------------------

Comment(by phobos):

 Replying to [comment:35 cypherpunks]:
 > 1. Why discriminate based upon transport protocol? If allowing HTTP and
 HTTPS to the forums is valid, then so is XMPP, YIM, MSN, IRC, and SMTP. If
 the forum software is a generic threaded communication engine, restricting
 by transport protocol is illogical. GET and POST to forums should be user
 preference, perhaps defaulting to HTTPS. Rather than build three
 communities, integrate them all. IRC, SMTP (mailing lists), and forums
 should be all merged into one entity. Users can interact with the forums
 using their preferred protocols and clients.

 Having implemented something like this in the past, forcing users to watch
 a 20 minute tutorial on how to use the system is suboptimal. In my case it
 was Jive, http://www.jivesoftware.com/, which allows a multitude of
 protocols to talk to their messaging engine.

 > 2. It is clear to an outsider that the tor developers do not want to be
 part of the web forums. This is ok. Web forum communities are different
 than other communities for good reason. Commingling such communities only
 leads to disaster and a moderation nightmare.

 If we're going to do this, some devs have to pay attention. Otherwise the
 forums will be full of misinformation for indexing by google/ddg/bing.

 > 3. From a few weeks of observation, the IRC community is very different
 than the mailing list community. Tor is doing a poor job of managing both
 communities. I think you will fail to create and grow a web forum
 community.  The time to grow a community, or fracture an existing one, is
 when the current communities are saturated or communication is becoming
 difficult. This is clearly not the case in both IRC and mailing list
 communities. The #tor IRC channel maintains 200 people or so at a time.
 Successful IRC communities number in the thousands. The mailing lists are
 barely one post per day on average. Tor-talk and Tor-dev should be grown
 to the point where 30-50 posts per day is the norm. You then split these
 lists into sub-topic lists. When your communities in both IRC and mailing
 list have grown to thousands or tens of thousands, this is the point when
 you split off into a new medium (point number 1 above notwithstanding).
 >
 > 4. Tor developers are self-professed mailing list/IRC users. The IRC
 channel is barely used by tor devs. The mailing lists are mostly ignored
 by tor devs. Optimally, this means tor devs are writing code or making
 more tor. Adding a third community to ignore isn't going to work for
 anyone. Stop deluding yourselves. Focus on your strengths and build more
 tor. There are many growing tor communities, in native languages,
 globally. Centralizing these communities is a waste of time.

 I'm not sure I agree with the scale statements. Also, I suspect you are
 the person who left a 14 minute detailed voicemail stating that our lack
 of web forums is embarrassing, and then proceeded to explain why web
 forums are embarrassing.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3592#comment:36>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
The Tor Project: anonymity online
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