[tor-reports] Lunar's report for March 2014

Tue Apr 1 09:37:36 UTC 2014

Hi!

Here are Tor matters that kept Lunar busy in March:

Help desk
---------

Handled 357 tickets in English, 37 tickets in French and sorted
around 120 spams.

Sent the Tor help desk report for February, with a top of used
template answers [1].

Started a discussion with Matt over a process failure in handling an
external request to the support team. The discussion was far from being
a success. Even if I know understand a lot better what happened, I still
have worries. More importantly, Matt expressed that I have been
harassing him.

With the help of Karsten, we made graphs to show the help desk activity
to be included in SponsorO reports: pie charts measuring response
times [2], bar graphs measuring the number of new tickets for each
queue [3].

These scripts lie in the new `support-tools` Git repository [4].

Helped test Sherief and Colin’s work on the support webchat [5]. The
result is really nice and should make our users happy. I also gave
several comments on Sherief’s code.

Nicolas Viguier kindly accepted to take over the French help desk during
my vacations. We took the time of a small crash course in Request
Tracker, our usual set of answers, and how the support team worked.

   [1]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2014-March/000469.html
   [2]: https://bugs.torproject.org/11177
   [3]: https://bugs.torproject.org/11178
   [4]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/support-tools.git
   [5]: https://bugs.torproject.org/10754

Documentation
-------------

Tor Browser User Manual [6] needs be modular, have specific sections for
each platform, and be localizable. Choosing a good source format could
save us headaches later.

I’ve initially worked on a proof-of-concept using Markdown, Pandoc and
po4a [7].

Then I’ve discovered Project Mallard [8], a source format designed from
the experience of the GNOME Documentation Team. After completing a
proof-of-concept [9], I was quite convinced it will help us write a good
manual. Members of the support and the Tor Browser teams who took a look
were on the same page.

   [6]: https://bugs.torproject.org/10974
   [7]: https://bugs.torproject.org/10979
   [8]: http://projectmallard.org/
   [9]: https://bugs.torproject.org/11124

Tor Weekly News
---------------

Wrote a good amount of the 35th and 39th, and most of the 36th, 37th,
38th issues of Tor Weekly News. Been the editor for 35th, 36th, and 37th.

harmony now has all the needed access to publish Tor Weekly News (blog
included). This was happily verified for the 38th which was entirely
published without my intervention. Hurray for bus factor reduction!

harmony also kindly agreed to take over the 40th issue while I’ll be
offline.

2014 Summer meeting
-------------------

Helped organize a poll to gather opinions about the preferred format for
the meeting.

Spent a week in Paris where I visited the primary location for the
meeting, and met several Tor supporters who could have helped us
organize the meeting.

Unfortunately, this was a waste of time. It appears help is unnecessary.

Debian packages
---------------

ooniprobe is now in Debian [10], closing a year long effort [11].

Uploaded torsocks/2.0.0~rc6-1 to Debian experimental [12].

Uploaded obfsproxy/0.2.7-1 to Debian unstable [13]. Then backported to
Debian wheezy backports and to deb.torproject.org’s quantal, raring, and
saucy repository. I was unable to backport to precise, squeeze, and
wheezy on deb.tpo because 0.2.7-1 needs a too recent version of Twisted.

  [10]: https://ftp-master.debian.org/new/ooniprobe_1.0.1-1.html
  [11]: https://bugs.torproject.org/8506
  [12]: http://packages.qa.debian.org/t/torsocks/news/20140317T212304Z.html
  [13]: http://packages.qa.debian.org/o/obfsproxy/news/20140315T151924Z.html

Misc.
-----

Spotted a mistake in tor(1) manpage [14].

Took a look at the current status of APAF [15] while evaluating
solutions for a point-click-publish hidden service publishig system.
APAF is promising but still need a important amount of polishing before
being production ready.

Wrote a draft report describing February activity to be sent to
SponsorF.

  [14]: https://bugs.torproject.org/11118
  [15]: http://apaf.readthedocs.org/

What’s in for April?
--------------------

First and foremost: Vacation! I will be unavailable and mostly offline
from 2014-04-02 to 2014-04-10. I think it’s been years since I haven’t
really done that.

Then, more of user support matters, Tor Browser User Manual, Tor Weekly
News, Debian packaging, SponsorF and SponsorO reporting, and hopefully
website work.

-- 
Lunar                                             <lunar at torproject.org>
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