[tor-project] Nina’s Monthly Status Report, July 2022

[nina13 at riseup.net]

Hi, everyone,

This is my status report for July.

My focus remains the same - support the Russian-speaking users in their
interactions with Tor Browser through email, our telegram account, and
our forum and IRC chat.

This month, there were two significant events that I dealt with - the
release of the new version of Tor Browser - 11.5 and internet censorship
events in Turkmenistan.

1. User support
Overall
In July, I successfully resolved 473 tickets.

On Telegram (@TorProjectSupportBot) - 239
On email (frontdesk at tpo) - 234

Unlike the previous month, I got almost the same amount of user requests
on telegram and email in July. I've got many requests on the email
frontdesk at tpo from Turkmenistan - the country facing enormous internet
censorship. And email communication is more popular as messengers are
banned there.

2. New version of TB 

In July new version of Tor Browser 11.5 was released, so I took part in
getting users' feedback on the Connection Assist [1]. 

Thanks to the new version - the number of bridge requests from Russia
lowered in July.

3. User support templates

This month I updated the user support templates in Russian according to
the new features of the Tor Browser.

While doing it, I found a bug with the bridges display [2]. 

As the Tor Project website was, first, unblocked in Russia and then -
blocked again - it caused some extra work on updating the templates.

Due to the censorship events in Turkmenistan[3], I gathered all the
information that can help users connect to Tor and updated a template
for the users from this country.

[1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40086
[2]
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41059
[3]
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/issues/40029