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

[Joydeep Sen Gupta]

Hello everyone!

Here are my updates from the month of August.

Firstly, I am happy to share that we have now launched our user support
channel on Signal[0]!
For a second consecutive month there has been a
major uptick in requests for unlisted obfs4 bridges from users in China
and Turkmenistan. Noting that a lot of these users are not using the
latest version of Tor Browser and hence unable to take advantage of the
new Connection Assist[1], I have updated our internal support docs with
instructions on how to update the browser and how to use the Connection
Assist. Also hoping to gain some good feedback from the users about
Connection Assist in the process[2].

In light of the "Help Smash Tor Bugs!" campaign, we received a bunch of
user support requests from users new to the Tor ecosystem on our support
channels. Questions ranging from how to get started with Tor Browser,
using pluggable transports, using and setting up snowflake proxies to
the recommended Tor-based browser on iOS.

Now some quick stats and highlights from our official support channels.

## Frontdesk

Timeline : 01 August - 31 August 2022

Tickets:

new: 33
open: 22
resolved: 906

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

(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.)

Windows - 10
macOS - 9
GNU/Linux - 3
Android- 11
Breakdown of most frequent tickets (at least 3 RT tickets):

1. 410 RT Tickets - Private Bridge requests. This is not related to the
.ru censorship but requests from Tor users in China, Turkmenistan, etc.

2. 83 RT Tickets - How to use Tor Bridges in Russia.[3]

3. 4 RT Tickets - Bug in rendering webpages on Tor Browser for Android,
specific to the Samsung S22 device[4]

4. 3 RT Tickets - Tor app for iOS (Onion Browser)[5]


## Tor Forum

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

1. "Does connecting to your own Guard increase or decrease overall
security?".[6]

2. "New to server operation"[7]

3. "Memory limits for Snowflake process"[8]

4. "Guard relay in Kubernetes"[9]

5. "How quickly is deb.torproject.org updated?"[10]

Thanks,

-- Joydeep


[0]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-user-support-a-new-encrypted-way-to-help-tor-users-via-signal/4428
[1]: https://support.torproject.org/glossary/connection-assist/
[2]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40088
[3]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-blocked-in-russia-how-to-circumvent-censorship/982
[4]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41186
[5]: https://support.torproject.org/tormobile/tormobile-3/
[6]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/does-connecting-to-your-own-guard-increase-or-decrease-overall-security/4169/
[7]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/new-to-server-operation/4188/
[8]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/memory-limits-for-snowflake-process/4236/
[9]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/guard-relay-in-kubernetes/4298/
[10]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/how-quickly-is-deb-torproject-org-updated/4281/