Rationale:

 - Right now:

   - These pages' Markdown will be rendered when browsing our
     repository in the GitLab web interface

   - The .md extension is more common nowadays: GitHub, GitLab, and various
     other major players have settled on it. Let's get used to it.

 - If we decide to migrate our blueprints to GitLab (#18079),
   this will be a necessary first step.

Helpdesk_Auto-reply.md

+Have an auto reply for users writing to HelpDesk
+================================================
+
+
+In order to lower the pressure/urgency of each individual request to HelpDesk,
+making it easier to provide more edited information to the rest of the teams
+according to our [[mission|contribute/working_together/roles/help_desk/]], we want to have an auto reply for users so they can
+self-diagnose the most common problems. Main ticket is [[!tails_ticket 17935]]
+
+
+We want requests sent to Help Desk to get an automatic email answer:
+
+- “thanks, we don’t have the capacity to answer every request”
+- link to the doc and FAQ
+- set lower expectations wrt. timing
+- for new software suggestions and other dev topics, refer users to https://tails.boum.org/support/faq/#software - https://tails.boum.org/contribute/
+
+Help Desk would still read the reports and extract the info we need for the “Gather qualitative and quantitative user data” part of its [[mission|contribute/working_together/roles/help_desk/]], but will not always answer a personally crafted message to users.
+
+
+Requirements
+------------
+
+- Help Desk members must be able to easily propose changes, for example, to maintain in the message the list of current Top 10 issues reported by users.
+- Technical writers also need access to edit the content of the auto-reply.
+
+- Non-WhisperBack emails: Only the 1st email in a thread triggers the auto-reply.
+  Otherwise it would be very noisy for the user and send mixed signals ("we need more info from you but we might not
+answer a second time").
+
+- WhisperBack emails: Some kind of notification when sending a report
+  How would we let them know about the newer hot topics? 
+  - Adding a link to somewhere on our website would miss many people.
+  - Embedding the current list in the notification would require to either fetch it in
+the background.
+  - including the list in the image does not work, because it would be outdated as soon
+as the image is released and we won't be able to rely this mechanism for issues
+in the release itself, which misses most of the point.
+
+
+Which email gets an auto-reply
+------------------------------
+
+HelpDesk receives:
+
+- WhisperBack reports
+- Emails sent to tails-support-private
+- Emails forwarded from other lists to which users write by mistake.
+- Mailing list moderation emails
+
+Most users are writing to tails-support-private@.
+
+tails-bugs@ only receives unencrypted admin emails from the lists, emails from contributors or helpdesk, and WhisperBack reports.
+
+Questions:
+
+- Is it OK if all messages sent by tails-bugs members receive the
+  auto-reply message to? (For example, if these messages have a
+  special header that could allow you folks to configure your email
+  client to automatically [delete] them?)
+- Is it OK if messages sent via WhisperBack don’t get an auto-reply
+  email? - Can the last page of the WhisperBack report show the user a link to a web version of the auto-reply email?
+  (Perhaps, after submission, a part of the auto-reply can be shown, and a link to "latest hot topics and such")
+- Is it OK if every message, even if it’s not the beginning of a
+thread, gets an auto-reply email?
+- Can we track opening posts in email headers? Should we rely on the Re: in the subject line? - What about the "In-Reply-To" field
+  - we can also rely on the fact that people writing an email to the help desk write to tails-support-private@ and receive a reply from tails-bugs@, so their second email will be to tails-bugs@ 
+
+Implementation
+--------------
+- Write a generic message
+
+- [[!tails_ticket 17966 desc="Write standard text to answer hardware support reports for which we can't do anything"]]
+
+
+Deployment
+----------
+
+
+
+Changes to HelpDesk workflow after completion
+---------------------------------------------
+
+Once this auto-reply is in place, a number of other, important [[!tails_ticket 17965 desc="changes can be implemented in Help Desk’s workflow and processes"]].
+
+
+<h1 id="template">Actual Auto-reply</h1>
+
+    Dear Tails user,
+
+    We are a very small team working on very limited human resources, with
+    regards to that, we may not be able to reply to every request we
+    receive, or, we may not reply in a timely manner. In advance, we
+    apologize for that.
+
+    You should find many resources on our support page:
+
+    https://tails.boum.org/support
+
+    From there you should find links to your complete documentation, our FAQ
+    and our known issues page, that includes a page dedicated to graphic
+    card issues.
+
+    If you are getting the "Error starting GDM", please read the provided
+    link: https://tails.boum.org/gdm
+
+    It is very difficult to investigate such problems without having access
+    to the affected computer. Furthermore, even if we managed to investigate
+    the problem, unfortunately we would lack resources to solve it.
+
+    We need more information from you in 2 cases:
+        - If this problem did not happen with an older version of Tails:
+          Please tell us which older version worked better.
+        - If you find a way to workaround the problem:  Please tell us, and
+          we will document it so that other affected users benefit from your
+    findings. Our best hope is that a future Linux driver update will solve
+    the problem.
+
+    For advanced Linux users: if you want to dig deeper on your own, you can
+    take it upstream after reproducing on a recent, non-Tails Linux system.
+
+    If your issue is related to the Tor Network itself, please consider
+    contacting the The Tor Project instead.
+
+    If your issue is related to software included in Tails, please consider
+    contacting their support channels.
+
+    Thanks for your understanding, and have a very nice day.