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

[Lunar]

Hi mighty Tor community,

So, what kept Lunar busy in January regarding Tor matters?

Help desk
---------

On the coordination front, I took some more time to refine the scripts
to generate the monthly help desk report and sent the one for December
2013.

I have handled 229 tickets in English, 45 tickets in French and sorted
out a hundred spams.

The new load on the help desk is concerning. I followed up on #10534 to
discuss how support is advertised in the Tor Browser Bundle.

I wrote one lengthly template for people affected by ransomware
using Tor hidden services. I also made a French version.

I have experienced my first support failure on the French queue. After
some basic questions and suggestions which did not help, the user was
not willing to provide more details on their problem after being
repeatedly asked to do so and declared I was incompetent. Sherief
kindly took over in English.

The Tor Browser Bundle now contains a rule for Stack Exchange (#10551).
I have been able to answer my first question on Tor SE:
http://tor.stackexchange.com/a/1417/1041

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

I have been an editor for issues #26, #27, and #29. I wrote most of #26,
#27, #28 and #29. I also took care of publishing all issues on the blog.

93 more subscribers in January.

Website redesign effort
-----------------------

After several discussions at the 30C3, it felt time to try to gather
some volunteers around a redesign of the Tor website.

After some discussions, the new www-team mailing list was created and
I wrote a call for help for the blog:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-website-needs-your-help

The call was relayed quite broadly, a little bit too much for my taste.
The mailing list currently has 120 subscribers. It might be a little
bit too much to create a community of people doing things and not only
talking about them, but I hope for the best.

Andrew has spent quite some time sorting out old and new tickets. The
current situation of the project should be reflected on the dedicated
wiki page: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/Website

I have documented how to build the current WML-based website.
From there, I extracted a list of all pages currently available
on the current site:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10591#comment:1

I've done a shallow survey of free software commenting system that could
be used together with a static site generator:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10022#comment:12

I've been answering questions from newcomers and suggest tasks on
the mailing list.

Misc.
-----

I have been trying to prepare the upcoming winter dev. meeting
by collecting discussion ideas and filling with some logistics
(transportation, food):
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2014WinterDevMeeting

Tickets were I have chimed in with thoughts:

 * #10059: Capture tor log messages before control connection is opened
 * #10398: Untranslatable strings in TBB
 * #10439: Allow TBB 3.x to run multiple times in parallel
 * #10610: Users don't know if their network is free of obstacles or not
 * #10675: Let's make a graph of hits on the RecommendedTBBVersions file
 * #10717: Anti-abuse for webchat support system

I did some more work on packaging ooni-probe and then got somewhat
demotivated by a severe lack of communication (#8506).

I have sent several emails to Apple to try to get the “Tor Browser” fake
thing removed from the iOS AppStore (#10549) but they never even
replied.

I did some tests on Ubuntu 13.10 to try to solve the ibus-related input
issue (#9353).

I have updated txtorcon in Debian to 0.9.1-1. I finally did backports
for Ubuntu Saucy of pyptlib and obfsproxy for deb.torproject.org.

I've organized a booth for FOSDEM’14 at the very last minute.

What's in for February?
-----------------------

Help desk work! Looks like the stream of tickets is not going to stop.
More Tor Weekly News articles and four releases this month. Let's also
try to do pull “stone soup” tricks for the website redesign:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup

Attend the dev. meeting in Iceland!

-- 
Lunar                                             <lunar at torproject.org>
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