Hello everyone! These are my updates from September.
In the past month our support channels have received a unprecedented number of user support requests from Iran. Across our official support channels - email, Telegram and Signal - we have resolved more than 4000 support tickets! With help and inputs from my fellow community team members and the localization team, I drafted a user guide on how to circumvent censorship with Tor in Iran[1]. This is very much ongoing work and we are actively monitoring the situation and will keep updating the user guide.
With such large volume of support requests there have been some challenges as well. Our cdr.link (Telegram and Signal support channel) has been running into some issues with message reception and delivery through the @TorProjectSupportBot on Telegram and I have been in touch with the cdr.link support team about this (massive shout-out to them for the prompt response to this!) More details in the ticket[2].
While the questions have been mostly around using pluggable transports with Tor Browser, Orbot and Onion Browser in Iran, I have helped a number of users with instructions to verify their Tor Browser install, setting up F-Droid to download Tor Browser for Android (as a result of our main website and mirrors being blocked) and as part of our campaign[3] to run more snowflake proxies, to setup snowflake proxies for folks where internet is not censored.
Apart from this, with two Tor Browser Alpha releases I have been involved with testing and overall quality assurance and added documentation about the Telegram GetTor bot to the Tor Browser Manual[4].
That pretty much sums up the highlights from last month and following are some quick stats and highlights from our official support channels.
Timeline: 01 - 30 September 2022
# Frontdesk
Tickets:
open: 58 resolved: 1273
Breakdown of number of RT tickets received with respect to operating system:
Breakdown of most frequent tickets by numbers:
1. 1059 RT Tickets - Circumventing Censorship with Tor in Iran.
2. 172 RT Tickets - Private Bridge requests from China[5]
3. 69 RT Tickets - How to use a Tor Bridge in Russia[6]
# Telegram and Signal Support channel (cdr.link)
tickets resolved: 2925
Most of these tickets have been about circumventing censorship in Iran. The other most frequent ticket we received have been about:
101 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Russia
9 tickets - Using unlisted obfs4 bridges in China
9 tickets - Help with setting up snowflake and other general questions about the pluggable transport
# Tor Forum
Most popular topics in the Support category (in terms of no. of views):
1. "Iran: Circumventing Censorship with Tor"[1]
2. "Snowflake Chrome extension doesn’t seem to be working for me"[7]
3. "Two-layered access"[8]
4. "Snowflake standalone proxy: NAT behaviour"[9]
5. "Your server has not managed to confirm reachability for its ORPort(s)"[10]
Thanks,
-- Joydeep
[1]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/iran-circumventing-censorship-with-tor/4590 [2]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40092 [3]: https://twitter.com/torproject/status/1573670895696183303 [4]: https://tb-manual.torproject.org/downloading/ [5]: https://support.torproject.org/censorship/connecting-from-china/ [6]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-blocked-in-russia-how-to-circumvent-censo... [7]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/snowflake-chrome-extension-doesnt-seem-to-be-... [8]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/two-layered-access/4783 [9]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/snowflake-standalone-proxy-nat-behaviour/4885 [10]: https://forum.torproject.net/t/your-server-has-not-managed-to-confirm-reacha...