while helping others with their nodes (just as being a part of the validator community) I got the impression that some need more help sometimes then we can provide them (especially smaller validators without essential knowledge) with the docs and GitHub repositories.
I had the idea that maybe some small funding from the community pool (or from any committee if that makes more sense) could be used to have a node/validator runner support would be the first person to talk to in case there are problems with a node or validator.
The person could even assist in helping with optimizations of smaller nodes/smaller validators to make them more stable and improve uptime. I felt that sometimes the smaller validators don’t know where to start and don’t know how to optimize everything or bigger node runners that just need a (fast) helping hand with quick sync or other errors.
I would like to have your opinion on that first and if would make sense to pay someone (I would be interested in doing it) for doing this part time/full time ?
Also I would like to know if you are content in me doing this kind of support ?
Just for my understanding, is this just an exploratory thread for feedback, or are you also planning to go to the chain with this?
There are two people providing technical support within the Support Team, I think nodes are part of that? @dylanschultzie@ertemann could you confirm?
On the topic itself, I think support for node runners is important especially for dApps launching their own nodes or technical people that are getting used to Secret Network. We should however also make sure that people have enough experience to keep it running themselves. I believe there have been a few instances where someone was trying to set up a node without adequate experience and it cost people helping them a lot of time which in the end also turned out to be a waste of time.
@pmuecke Yeah I just wanted to start an exploratory thread for this at the start. If something fruitful comes of this thread I might suggest something on chain (with a proper proposal and everything), but I wanted to gather some opinions of validators and governance first.
I thought that the support team atm was only responsible for enduser support and not for running node/validator support.
Reverse and Schultzie are the most knowledgeable people on this topic in the support team and do sometimes help people by redirecting them to resources installing CLI etc but i have never seen a support ticket where someone is directed to start a node from scratch to operational.
I always thought Validator support was more something done in the validator chat and tbh i think it should stay that way. A lot of validators happily spend a few hours trying to help someone new and i think this social system should be sufficient (especially when the documentation is going to be improved significantly). I know this is counterintuitive to the 24/7 support team but i think there is a clear difference between helping new users (who barely dedicate any time and there are a lot of them) and new node runners (who have taken sufficient time to learn and get started and only a few capable people come up every month).
I understand why you might see the need for this role but i dont think this should fall on the community pool. afaik there is a nice web of validators willing to support newcomers and i do like that system personally. Not everything has to be incentivized with tokens perse. Ofcourse there is also an argument to be made that if someone is willing to run a node they should have the knowledge to do so and not rely on the funded validator support to keep their node running.
I would support maybe a smaller commitment of a small team to get a more updated documentation page for node standards and best practices. This could contain more info on topics like:
What kind of hardware is preferred and why?
Which servers do better on which topics and why?
Explanation regarding peers and the current Seed list.
Common errors and best way to fix them
Direction to snapshots for quicksyncs
validator best practices (how to run backup etc)
Hope this is the type of feedback you are looking for
I agree with this from @ertemann. I am currently working on the documentation to provide more support for anyone looking for help/support related to node/validator operations.
There is an issue on the github docs page where you can officially request anything to be added to documentation that is node related.
I’ve left this open for a while now to try to gather some more opinions on this.
But to conclude this on my side: I agree with you @ertemann, thanks for the points/feedback that you gave here.
Especially after the shockwave alpha upgrade we got a lot less requests because we don’t need to provide a .compute folder separately.
