[tor-project] ebanam's status report for September 2023

[ebanam]

Hello everyone!

Most of my work last month was focussed around helping users
troubleshoot and connect to Tor in regions where Tor is heavily
censored. In particular, helping users when we got reports of issues
connecting with Snowflake[0][1].

Some of my work was concentrated around post-release support work for
Tor Browser releases (we had 3 stable and 3 alpha releases). In
particular, we got a few user reports of expired subkey warnings with
Tor Browser GPG verification[2] and numerous reports of the latest
version of Tor Browser getting flagged as malware on Windows[3]. With
the upcoming major stable release (Tor Browser 13.0), I did some alpha
testing and provided some feedback to our browser and UX teams.

Following is a thorough breakdown of tickets our user support team
handled in September:

Timeframe: 01 - 30 September 2023

# Frontdesk (email support channel)

* 719(↓) RT tickets created
* 643(↓) RT tickets resolved

Most frequent tickets by numbers:

1. 256(↓) RT tickets: private bridge requests from Chinese speaking
users.
2. 236(↓) RT tickets: circumventing censorship in Russian
speaking countries.
3. 47 RT tickets: Tor Browser detected as malware on
Windows.
4. 6(↑) RT tickets: circumventing censorship with Tor in Farsi.
5. 5 RT tickets: gpg verification on Tor Browser warns about expired
subkey.


# Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal Support channel

*  522(↓) tickets resolved

Breakdown:

*  493(↓) tickets on Telegram
*   22(-) tickets on WhatsApp
*    7(↓) tickets on Signal

The most frequent tickets on cdr.link have been about:

1. 277(↓) tickets: circumventing censorship in Russian speaking
countries.
2. 40 tickets: Tor Browser detected as malware on Windows
3. 25(↑) tickets: circumventing censorship with Tor in Farsi.
4. 23(↑) tickets: private bridge requests from Chinese speaking users.
5. 4 tickets: gpg verification on Tor Browser warns about expired subkey.


# Highlights from the Tor Forum

1. Problems with Snowflake since 2023-09-20: “broker failure Unexpected
error, no answer.”[0]
2. Arti 1.1.8 is released: Onion service infrastructure[4]
3. A closer look at online privacy: new Tor tutorials[5]

Thanks!
e.

Note: (↑), (↓) and (-) are indicative if the number of tickets we
received for these topics have been increasing, decreasing or have been
the same from the previous month respectively.

[0]: https://forum.torproject.org/t/problems-with-snowflake-since-2023-09-20-broker-failure-unexpected-error-no-answer/9346
[1]: https://forum.torproject.org/t/temporary-fix-for-moat-and-connection-assist/9385
[2]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/40957
[3]: https://forum.torproject.org/t/torbrowser-12-5-6-no-longer-flagged-by-windows-defender/9522
[4]: https://forum.torproject.org/t/arti-1-1-8-is-released-onion-service-infrastructure/9082
[5]: https://forum.torproject.org/t/a-closer-look-at-online-privacy-new-tor-tutorials/9560