Community Support

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Community Support Only means Whonix developers are unlikely provide free support for wiki chapters or pages with this tag that link here.

Introduction[edit]

Community Support Only means Whonix developers are unlikely to provide free support for wiki chapters or pages with this tag that link here. However, this concept is a little different from unsupported.

Please help us to better support this feature by becoming a contributor. Users are also asked to consider the Self Support First Policy.

It might be possible to get this feature implemented, documented, tested and/or supported by purchasing Premium Support.

Rationale[edit]

A lot of documentation has been contributed by the Whonix community. Entries with the Community Support Only tag are routinely audited by Whonix developers after being submitted and prior to publication. This means new entries are often reproduced and confirmed to be functional, as well as being non-malicious in scope. [1] In other cases, documentation was directly added by Whonix developers in the past when they were interested in particular topics, although interests change over time.

Due to the wide scope of topics some documentation material can become dated, but it is often still useful for many interested users. Occasionally some instructions or guides may not work for individuals due to factors like user error, localized issues, transient (network) issues caused by third parties, updates by third parties, other or unknown causes. In this event relevant documentation is not deleted, but its support status will be properly clarified when issues are identified.

Interested users are free to ask questions in the Whonix forums. In many cases there are existing or related threads discussing the functionality in question, raised by the Whonix community or contributor prior to and/or after creation of the community documentation. There is a good chance that the contributor or community will be able to answer specific questions. However, Whonix developers should not be expected to replicate the functionality, re-test or troubleshoot any issues.

Developer Constraints[edit]

Developers have significant time restraints due to their primary focus on improving the privacy and security of the Whonix platform. Consequently, developers cannot constantly re-test the functionality of certain combinations of third party software in Whonix. [2] Fortunately when imperfect documentation exists the Whonix community often steps forward to fix or enhance it.

Footnotes[edit]

  1. No guarantees are implied; developers audit material to the best of their abilities.
  2. Consider the following analogy. A popular speaker at a conference is approached by 500 people before their speech. Each individual requests a private discussion of only five minutes. The speaker made a rough calculation; ~500 people multiplied by five minutes equals 2,500 minutes or ~ 41 hours (nearly two days). Clearly it is infeasible for one speaker to accommodate everyone's request for a short discussion.

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