-------- Forwarded Message -------- From: Andrew Lewman <andrew@torproject.org> Reply-to: tor-talk@lists.torproject.org To: tor-talk@lists.torproject.org Subject: [tor-talk] Talking to users Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2011 13:06:03 -0400 On July 4th, with svn commit r24859, I put the official tor phone number on the 'Contact Us' page. This same phone number has been on the press page for ages. I did this to see what would happen, and to give people an obvious way to call us. I've heard from a number of people over the past year that they wish there was a way to call Tor and ask a question. Perhaps this is a larger sign of our website and documentation needing help. Perhaps some people just like to talk on the phone. The phone rings about twice a day on average. I've had some great conversations with people, ranging from victims of cyberstalking, to law enforcement, and many regular people with questions. I also talked someone who wanted to know if tor could help them resist the 'smart dust' from the cia being blown into their central air system to implant false memories to convince them they are not an actual time traveler from centuries in the future. The good news is, something like tor is wildly popular in the 2400s. I've also pointed a few people at various relakks and ipredator, because they didn't care about anonymity, just geolocation and circumvention for various reasons. There have been some tickets created as a result of these phone calls: * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3558 * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3559 * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3570 One set of tickets came from a 30 minute conversation with someone: * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3590 * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3593 * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3592 The top three complaints so far have been: 1. Tor is too complex. 2. Lack of Adobe Flash breaks too many websites. 3. Tor's documentation is too hard to find on the Internet. Here are my general impressions on the complaints. *Tor is too complex.* Most of the people don't care about Tor per se. They care about using Tor as a tool to get some task or function done. In most cases, this is protecting their identity online. They don't want to buy in to Tor, join our religion, nor subscribe to our newsletter. They just want to use it and not have to worry about it. The exceptions to this were the cyberstalking victim and the law enforcement officer. Both felt Tor was too complex, but cared very much about Tor as more than just a tool. Neither realized the Tor Browser Bundle existed. *Lack of Adobe Flash breaks too many websites.* People use Tor to circumvent censorship to watch cats on YouTube and other video sites. Apparently people also use Tor for Facebook and a number of other sites that require Flash to be functional. One person told me that the risk of a rogue Flash app disclosing their identity is acceptible over Tor. The flash cookie problem is 'easily taken care of by plugins, dude'. I'm sensing that Flash is the main reason people start with TBB and then move on to installing Tor locally; and finding it complex and difficult to configure. Perhaps the sandboxing technology we're using in the OS X TBB will make its way into Windows and Linux soon. *Tor's documentation is too hard to find on the Internet.* I agree. I have trouble finding the docs and various configuration parameters needed. This is even more the case when someone is on the phone asking a question. Clearly we need to improve this for everyone. Our docs are scattered across git, svn, website, trac tickets, and wiki links. Maybe one central location that pulls all of this into some coherent page would be a good first step. Maybe a search crawler that worked well would be also be a good step. I welcome feedback and comments. Thanks! -- Andrew pgp 0x74ED336B _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]