Hello everyone!
This is a report of some of the work done by the Community Team in the past month and general user feedback that we've received across our official support channels.
--- Request Tracker ---
This includes tickets created between 11th to 28th February, 2021.
Tickets created: 112
Tickets resolved: 156 (we resolved a lot of tickets that we were backlogged on)
# New RT templates
We aggregated statistics of what issues Tor users are frequently running into and made their solutions into articles/templates on the RT. This will help folks working on the RT to better support users. We created/updated the following articles:
1. Can't upload files on Tor Browser for Android 2. Tor Browser displaying webpages in foreign language 3. Unlisted obfs4 bridges 4. My Bank's website is blocking Tor 5. How to download 32-bit version of Tor Browser
Here is a list of issues which got the most attention (at least 2 tickets on RT):
# Tor Browser
Breakdown of number of RT tickets received with respect to operating system:
Windows (10,8,7 ...all the way upto Vista) - 30 MacOS - 7 GNU/Linux - 4 Android- 8
(Note: This includes tickets where the user mentioned the operating system or it was evident from the issue they were running into or enclosed screenshots.)
1. 11 RT tickets - Failure to launch Tor Browser. We point users to the "Six-point basic troubleshooting" article (template) on the RT to help users.
2. 3 RT tickets - Tor Browser doesn't run on Arch/openSUSE Tumbleweed/Fedora Rawhide. [1]
3. 3 RT tickets - DuckDuckGo doesn't redirect to it's html page on "Safest" Security Setting. The issue has been covered by the following ticket.[2]
4. 2 RT tickets - Cannot upload files on Tor Browser for Android. Regarding this we have a ticket open on our GitLab [3]. Last month, we also added this issue to the 'Known Issues' section in the Tor Browser User Manual.[4]
5. 2 RT tickets - Questions on how to import/export bookmarks in Tor Browser. We direct users to the article in the Tor Browser Manual.[5]
6. 2 RT tickets - Webpages show up in foreign languages. We have made the response to this into a template on RT taking help from the article in our Support portal.[6]
# General Issues
1. 3 RT tickets - Enquiries on relay setup. We direct users to the relay guide we have on the Community Portal.[7]
2. 2 RT tickets - Users unable to subscribe to the Newsletter since some major email services are bouncing our emails. We are running into this issue again this month. There's some discussion on this ticket.[8]
# UI/UX and documentation
1. 2 RT tickets - Users unable to donate via our donation page. We are still investigating the issue with the concerned users.
2. We have now updated all of our documentation (including screenshots and screencaps) in accordance with Tor Browser 10's interface.[9]
3. Since Tor Browser Developers Key is now available on keys.openpgp.org, we have accordingly updated our documentation around this.[10]
We have been unable to officially provide support in the following channels but here's what the discussion was about in the past month:
4. Google Play Store - In terms of user experience, reviews mostly revolve around- 'Can't keep Tor Browser for Android running in the background', 'cannot launch urls in Tor Browser without having it running and connected first', 'can't upload files with the browser' and 'Tor Browser is slow'. Although in terms of ratings we have quite a good amount of 4-star reviews.
5. Tor Stack Exchange - Statistics of what the discussion has been about (5 most active tags):
tor-browser-bundle- 23 questions configuration (questions about configuring Tor software)- 11 questions hidden-services- 12 questions anonymity- 8 questions
6. Reddit- Discussion has mostly been around DNS leaks while using Tor in Brave Browser and issues related to censorship. General discussion on using Tor and also a peak in interest regarding Snowflake.
# Anti-censorship and metrics
1. Including RT and #tor, we got a total of 6 requests for private bridges which have been from China (two requests), Middle East (two requests), Belarus (one request) and Thailand (one request).
2. Ongoing issue of users unable to connect to some of the bridges and/or relay statistics not showing up on metrics. We have the following GitLab tickets to cover this issue.[11][12]
If you have any suggestions, questions or want to discuss anything in detail please feel free to reach out to me and/or anyone from the Community Team!
Thanks, Joydeep
Links: [1]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40328 [2]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/torbutton/-/issues/40030 [3]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40283 [4]: https://tb-manual.torproject.org/mobile-tor/#known-issues [5]: https://support.torproject.org/tbb/export-and-import-bookmarks/ [6]: https://support.torproject.org/tbb/tbb-43/ [7]: https://community.torproject.org/relay/ [8]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/40164 [9]: https://tb-manual.torproject.org/ [10]: https://support.torproject.org/tbb/how-to-verify-signature/ [11]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/outreach/-/issues/40001 [12]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40005