[tor-project] Joydeep's Monthly Status Report for October 2022

[Joydeep Sen Gupta]

Hello everyone! These are my updates from October.

Much of my work was concentrated around helping users in Iran circumvent
censorship[1] and learning (and investigating) what usability and
connectivity issues they were facing amidst the heavy censorship. This
usually involved helping users with using pluggable transports with apps
in the Tor ecosystem and investigating Tor logs to figure out if and how
Tor was failing to connect. I have been able to respond to more than
500 support tickets from Iran in the last month but this is very much work in
progress as internet is heavily censored in Iran right now.

With the launch of the Year End Campaign, as always, we have generated a
good deal of interest on our user support and discussion platforms and I
have been responding to these queries. A lot of general Tor questions,
questions about using Tor Browser, etc.

We had 4 Tor Browser releases in the past month and I have been involved
with some testing and also wrote some documentation for the Tor Browser
Manual adding instructions for using the GetBridges Telegram bot[2]
and a dedicated help section[3].

A quick overview of our user support channels:

Timeline: 01 - 31 October 2022

# Frontdesk

Tickets:

open: 50
resolved: 766


Breakdown of most frequent tickets by numbers:

1. 99 RT Tickets - Circumventing Censorship with Tor in Iran.

2. 22 RT Tickets - Private Bridge requests from China[4]

3. 43 RT Tickets - How to use a Tor Bridge in Russia[5]


# Telegram and Signal Support channel (cdr.link)

Tickets resolved: 1475

The other most frequent ticket we received have been about:

1. 1140 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Iran.

2. 169 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Russia

3. 16 tickets - Using unlisted obfs4 bridges in China

4. 12 tickets - Questions about using Snowflake and setting up Snowflake
proxies

# Tor Forum

Most popular topics in the Support category (in terms of no. of views):

1. "Standalone proxy - traffic relayed almost zero with restricted NAT
type"[6]

2. "How can I use Snowflake with tor (service)?"[7]

3. "Why has Tor slowed down so much recently?"[8]

4. "Bookmarks in my Tor Browser"[9]

5. "Bridge or Snowflake? low RAM VPS"[10]

Thanks,

-- Joydeep


[1]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/iran-circumventing-censorship-with-tor/4590
[2]: https://tb-manual.torproject.org/bridges/
[3]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/manual/-/issues/131
[4]: https://support.torproject.org/censorship/connecting-from-china/
[5]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-blocked-in-russia-how-to-circumvent-censorship/982
[6]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/standalone-proxy-traffic-relayed-almost-zero-with-restricted-nat-type/5122/
[7]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/how-can-i-use-snowflake-with-tor-service/5045/
[8]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/why-has-tor-slowed-down-so-much-recently/5028/
[9]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/bookmarks-in-my-tor-browser/5310/7
[10]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/bridge-or-snowflake-low-ram-vps/5019/6