Tails

#1 Updated by sajolida 2016-09-03 12:08:59

• related to Feature #11775: Decide when to close down tails-support added

#2 Updated by sajolida 2016-09-13 04:09:12

• Status changed from Confirmed to In Progress

The draft is ready and has been reviewed by tails@boum.org. Now I need to do a branch for the blog post.

Subject: Closing tails-support@boum.org

Together with the people doing user support, people from tails@boum.org,
and other contributors, we decided to close down
tails-support@boum.org, our public mailing list for user support.

We created tails-support@boum.org [1] in 2013 after closing the forum
we had on this website.

[1]: https://tails.boum.org/news/tails-support/

The idea behind having a public space for user support was to:

- Reduce the amount of work for the help desk behind
  tails-support-private@boum.org (which is encrypted and also receives
  WhisperBack reports).

  This is not really working as tails-support-private@boum.org still
  has 12 times more traffic than tails-support@boum.org.

- Build a community of people doing user support outside of people
  working for the help desk and other core contributors.

  This is not really working either as most of the threads are still
  answered by people working on the help desk or other core
  contributors. Here are some statistic, over the last 12 months, on
  who first answered threads (spam excluded):

      core developers      59   36%
      nobody               53   32%
      help desk            37   22%
      other contributors   16   10%

      Total               165

- Build a public database of problems and answers so that both people
  asking questions and people answering them could reuse previous
  answers.

  This is not really working either as the archive of the mailing list
  are very hard to search and reuse and it's easier to point people to
  the documentation, known issues, or FAQ.

Having a public mailing list also makes it:

- Complicated to handle properly the email headers and making sure
  that both the list and the sender receive the answer.

- Tricky to ask for more technical information about the problem, such
  as logs, as they are harder for the person reporting the error to
  share with us and also raises privacy concerns.

- Duplicate work between tails-support-private@boum.org and
  tails-support@boum.org as people often write to both.

The downside that we could identify by closing tails-support@boum.org
is that it was a good place for developers to have some feedback on
the recurrent problems faced by users. We will try to solve this while
working on a request tracker for our help desk [2].

[2]: https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/RT_for_help_desk/

See you on tails-support-private@boum.org!

#3 Updated by sajolida 2016-11-04 12:32:17

• Target version set to 284

#4 Updated by anonym 2016-11-25 10:57:13

• Target version changed from 284 to Tails 2.10

#5 Updated by sajolida 2017-01-15 13:16:23

• Assignee changed from sajolida to spriver
• Target version deleted (Tails 2.10)
• QA Check set to Ready for QA
• Feature Branch set to web/11709-close-tails-support

I worked on this today.

spriver: are you interested in reviewing this? Otherwise please unassign it from you and set it for 2.10 so that we don’t loose it from sight.

My branch includes some important CSS simplification that I felt like doing now as an extension of this work but is otherwise slightly unrelated. I hope you don’t mind!

#7 Updated by spriver 2017-01-31 18:41:38

• Assignee changed from spriver to sajolida
• Feature Branch changed from web/11709-close-tails-support to spriver:web/11709-close-tails-support

Pushed some tiny changes to my repo. (: (Actually only affecting one page)
Please consider that I’m not a CSS pro, it’s some time ago that I worked with CSS intensively. The changes looked good to me, but don’t assume that I could verify them in rock-solid way.

#8 Updated by spriver 2017-01-31 18:44:41

• QA Check changed from Ready for QA to Pass

#9 Updated by sajolida 2017-06-07 17:17:30

• Feature Branch changed from spriver:web/11709-close-tails-support to web/11709-close-tails-support

I didn’t want to merge this during the donation campaign but then I completely forgot that this work was pretty much done and only required merging :(

I’m glad I discovered that right before 3.0 which should be good time for doing this.

So I merged this branch and will write root@boum.org to close this list.

#10 Updated by sajolida 2017-06-28 10:39:34

• Status changed from In Progress to Resolved
• Assignee deleted (sajolida)
• QA Check deleted (Pass)

Since then the list was closed: https://mailman.boum.org/listinfo/tails-support/.