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

[Joydeep Sen Gupta]

Hello everyone! :)

Here are my updates from December. I resolved 1120 tickets via email and
203 tickets on our telegram/signal user support channel. With Tor
Browser 12 release, I, along with @nina13, finished reviewing and
updating[1] all of our internal support documentation, including all
articles and templates we have on our Request Tracker and cdr.link
support channels. I was also involved with some testing before the
release. Post-release we got a few reports about false positives with
anti-virus software[2] on updating to Tor Browser 12 and issue with
rearranging bookmarks in Tor Browser with drag and drop not working[3].
All of these issues have been resolved with the 12.0.1 Tor Browser
update.

We discovered a issue[4] regarding sending emails from our email
ticketing system (Request Tracker) but a big shout-out to anarcat and
TPA for resolving the issue and also writing a script to resend all
the emails from the affected time span.

Continuing my work supporting users in Iran[5], I resolved around 180
tickets across our support channels.

Now, a quick overview of our user support channels:

Timeline: 01 - 31 December 2022

# Frontdesk

tickets created: 936
tickets resolved: 1442

Most frequent tickets by numbers:

1. 45 RT Tickets - Private Bridge requests from China[6]

2. 40 RT Tickets - How to use a Tor Bridge in Russia[7]

3. 12 RT Tickets - Anti-virus false positives with Tor Browser 12[2]

# Telegram and Signal Support channel (cdr.link)

tickets resolved: 751

The most frequent tickets we received have been about:

1. 272 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Russia

2. 173 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Iran

3. 85 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Turkmenistan

4. 16 tickets - Using unlisted obfs4 bridges in China

# Tor Forum

Most popular topics in the Support category (in terms of number of views):

1. "Image load error (HTTP/2 403 Forbidden) on some websites (with Tor
Browser)" [8]

2. "Newbie: snowflake abuse by local government?"[9]

3. "Websites blocking Tor"[10]

4. "Unable to run Tor Browser 12 for Linux after updating"[11]

5. "Problems with mega.nz (post Tor Browser 12 update)"[12]

Thanks,

-- Joydeep


[1]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40096#note_2860328
[2]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/norton-360-antivirus-now-considers-tor-browser-as-a-trojan-and-removes-it-from-a-computer-1st-noticed-dec-9-2022/5867
[3]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41520
[4]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41016
[5]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/iran-circumventing-censorship-with-tor/4590
[6]: https://support.torproject.org/censorship/connecting-from-china/
[7]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-blocked-in-russia-how-to-circumvent-censorship/982
[8]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/image-load-error-http-2-403-forbidden-on-some-websites/5974/
[9]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/newbie-snowflake-abuse-by-local-government/5889/
[10]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/websites-blocking-tor/6095/
[11]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/unable-to-run-tor-browser-12-for-linux-after-updating/5936/
[12]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/problems-with-mega-nz/5961/