[tor-project] Joydeep's Monthly Status Report for October 2021

[Joydeep Sen Gupta]

Hello everyone!

This is my monthly status report for October, 2021.

The priorities for this month have been to soft-launch and moderate the
new Tor Forum (forum.torproject.net), continue our user support work on
the official channels, namely, frontdesk (Request Tracker) and #tor on
OFTC IRC. 

# Soft-launch of the Tor Forum

This month much of my work went into planning the launch of Tor Forum
for user support. I am happy to report that the soft-launch period (25
October, 2021 - 31 October, 2021) went quite well barring a single
incident which Gus took care of. 

This would not have been possible without the team effort and I would 
like to thank and congratulate everyone who has been instrumental 
in the successful launch of our forum and has helped with moderation 
and so many other tasks :)

# Frontdesk

My work on the frontdesk got a bit sidetracked last month but I plan to
ramp up this month. 

Frontdesk stats: 
Timeline : 06 Oct 2021 (00:00 UTC) - 05 Nov 2021 (12:00
UTC) 
Tickets: new: 84 
         open: 10 
	 resolved: 73         

Breakdown of number of RT tickets received with respect to operating
system: 

Windows (10,8,7, all the way upto XP) - 17 
macOS -  4 
GNU/Linux - 2
Android- 9 

(Note: This includes tickets where the user mentioned the
operating system or it was evident from the issue they were running into
and/or enclosed screenshots.)

Frequent tickets (at least 2 RT tickets): 

1. 15 RT Tickets - Private Bridge requests. We recently added the article 'How to circumvent the Great
Firewall and connect to Tor from China?' to the Support Portal and as a
result of which we are receiving a lot of these requests per month. [1]

2. 4 RT Tickets - Tickets related to the VPN survey.  

3. 4 RT Tickets - Reports of fake Tor apps on the App Store. Most of these tickets are
from users who have paid for a subscription for apps masquerading as the
Tor Browser.  We are updating the 'Bad/Impersonating Tor Browser' list
in the wiki [2].  

4. 4 RT Tickets - Unable to access YouTube. For a
consecutive month, this issue has received a lot of attention.  

5. 4 RT Tickets - Issues with Tor Browser signature verification.  

6. 2 RT Tickets - Users unable to unsubscribe from our Newsletter [3] (thanks to
mattlav for resolving these tickets!) 

7. 2 RT Tickets - Network performance issues for October, 2021 [4]

Apart from the forum and RT, I have been active on #tor IRC and other
social media forums to answer support queries. If you have any
suggestions, questions or want to discuss anything in detail please feel
free to get in touch.

Thanks,

-- Joydeep

[1]: https://support.torproject.org/censorship/connecting-from-china/
[2]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/wikis/Bad_TorBrowsers
[3]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/civicrm/-/issues/31 
[4]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/team/-/issues/130