Clarify and make consistent example aliases.

[nathan-at-least]

On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 11:52 AM, Zooko Wilcox-OHearn [email protected] wrote:

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jean Lorchat [email protected] Date: Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 12:40 PM Subject: About S4 testing, some S3/Dropbox comparisons, and more To: Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn [email protected]

... snip ...

• There is a small inconsistency about the following two pages [1][2] that detail simple steps to get started. One has the alias as s4: and the other has the alias as lae:

Refs:

• [1] https://leastauthority.com/product_s4/
• [2] https://leastauthority.com/howtoconfigure

Additionally, I worry if potential users believe s4: and/or lae: are magic constants for use with our service, so I recommend changing them to my-alias: and example-alias: or something similar which attempts to self-describe as user-chosen.

[zookoatleastauthoritycom]

I think the best clarification is to remove all mention of aliases from the instructions and examples. You can use full caps in their place.

[zookoatleastauthoritycom]

I've seen many, many users confused and perplexed by aliases and how they work. For too many users for me to patiently educate them all in how aliases work. :-)

[nathan-at-least]

+1 on removing aliases altogether from our examples.

Another thought: Why are there two different pages describing how to configure an account? Can we combine these to streamline our site and have only one source of truth for customer how to?

On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 4:27 PM, zookoatleastauthoritycom < [email protected]> wrote:

I've seen many, many users confused and perplexed by aliases and how they work. For too many users for me to patiently educate them all in how aliases work. :-)

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/LeastAuthority/leastauthority.com/issues/207#issuecomment-45165049 .

Nathan Wilcox Least Authoritarian

[zookoatleastauthoritycom]

Per my concern in https://github.com/LeastAuthority/leastauthority.com/issues/186, I would really like for the one source of truth for customer configuration to be hosted and audited by the open source Tahoe-LAFS community. But, that may impose a usability cost on those customers…

[zookoatleastauthoritycom]

But in any case, I can't think of any reason to have two pages describing how to configure an account hosted on https://LeastAuthority.com. One, at most! Or maybe zero. But not two.

[daira]

#214 was a duplicate, its description was:

redundancy between /product_s4 and /howtoconfigure pages

It looks like the https://leastauthority.com/product_s4 page was partly copied from the https://leastauthority.com/howtoconfigure page, but we probably shouldn't have both -- especially as they use different aliases (s4: vs lae:).

[daira]

zooko wrote:

I think the best clarification is to remove all mention of aliases from the instructions and examples. You can use full caps in their place.

Zooko is showing one of his idiosyncrasies; most people don't want to have to store or copy/paste caps. Also, copy/pasting caps is a potential leakage vector.