[tor-project] Joydeep's Monthly Status Report

[Joydeep Sen Gupta]

Hello everyone!

This is my monthly status report for September-October, 2021 (starting
from September 15).

The priorities for this month have been to continue our user
support work on the official channels, namely frontdesk RT and #tor on
OFTC IRC. 

Frontdesk stats: 
Timeline : 15 Sept 2021 (00:00 UTC) - 06 Oct 2021 (00:00 UTC) 
Total tickets created:  90 
Total tickets resolved: 77 

Note: We receive a lot of spam (more on that down below!) and the total number
of tickets created might include some of the spammy tickets as well
since we have to manually label them as 'spam'.

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

Windows (10,8,7, all the way upto XP) - 10 
macOS - 3 
GNU/Linux - 3
Android- 7 
(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. 18 RT Tickets - Private Bridge requests. We recently added the entry
'How to circumvent the Great Firewall and connect to Tor from China?' to
the Support Portal [1] but I noticed [2] that a lot of those requests
were going into spam as the subject line of the email generally
consisted of non-ascii characters. We have now updated the article to
suggest users to include 'private bridge' in the subject line (and it
seems to be working well!).

2. 8 RT Tickets - Websites blocking Tor. We have received such
complaints from users trying to access Youtube and websites using Cloudflare. 

3. 4 RT Tickets - Failure to launch Tor Browser. This query is covered
by the "Seven-point basic troubleshooting" article (template) on the RT.

4. 3 RT Tickets - macOS download links for Tor Browser resulting in a
404 error.[3]

5. 2 RT Tickets - Can't upload files with Tor browser on Android.[4]

6. 2 RT Tickets - Queries regarding v2 onion services deprecation.

# Spam on frontdesk

I aggregated some rough stats on how much spam we are getting every
month and it's quite a lot. In the past few months, we have received
nearly 1200 to 1300 spam tickets per month. Gus has been blocking some
of the recurring spammers on the frontdesk although the stats, thus far,
don't look very promising. I have requested TPA to help us improve the
spam filter on frontdesk [5].

Apart from 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 contact me.

Thanks,

-- Joydeep

[1]: https://support.torproject.org/censorship/connecting-from-china/
[2]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/support/-/issues/261 
[3]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/tpo/-/issues/234#note_2752838 
[4]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40283
[5]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/40425

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