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

[Joydeep Sen Gupta]

Hello and a very happy new year everyone!

This is my monthly status report for December, 2021.

Helping Tor users in Russia circumvent censorship has been one of the
top priorities for last month. On 1st December we began receiving
reports from users that some ISPs in Russia have started to block access to Tor [1].
Since then we have received an unprecedented number of help request tickets on
frontdesk and I am happy to report that we have been successful in
dealing with a vast majority of them (thanks to Gus and Nina as well!)
Just to give an idea, we had resolved a total of 1456 tickets between
January and November 2021 but 1784 tickets were resolved in the month of
December alone. Apart from this, I have also been active on the Tor forum for
moderation and answering support queries and on #tor (IRC) and social media.

# Frontdesk stats

Timeline : 01 Dec 2021 - 31 Dec 2021

Tickets:

new: 158
open: 29
resolved: 1784

Breakdown of most frequent tickets (at least 5 RT tickets):

1. 1521 RT Tickets - How to use Tor Bridges in Russia. [2]

2. 41 RT Tickets - Submissions for 'Help Censored Users, Run a Tor
Bridge' campaign. [3]

3. 26 RT Tickets - Private Bridge requests. This is not related to the
.ru censorship but requests from Tor users in China, Iran, etc. [4]

4. 7 RT Tickets - Tor Browser incompatible with older versions of
macOS.[5]

5. 5 RT Tickets - Issues with Tor Browser 11. Most of these issues have
been fixed by the latest (11.0.3) update!

# Tor Forum

Most popular topics (in terms of views) after December 2021:

1. Tor blocked in Russia: how to circumvent censorship. [2]

2. Relays running an unsupported (EOL) Tor version. [6]

3. UI broke after updating [7]. Issues with Tor Browser 11 which
have now been resolved by the latest update!

If you have any suggestions, questions or want to discuss anything in
detail please feel free to get in touch.

Thanks,

-- Joydeep

[1]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/responding-to-tor-censorship-in-russia/1057
[2]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-blocked-in-russia-how-to-circumvent-censorship/982
[3]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/help-censored-users-run-a-tor-bridge/704
[4]: https://support.torproject.org/censorship/connecting-from-china/
[5]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/version-of-tor-browser-compatible-with-macos-10-11/1038/3
[6]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/relays-running-an-unsupported-eol-tor-version/63/
[7]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/ui-broke-after-updating/535/