Tracking Progress

11 Jul 2021

Hello everybody! :)
This blog post is about the progress i’ve made during the first half period of my internship and what are the goals for the other half.

Halfway through the internship and feels like I just started a week or two ago. Time flies, perhaps the time you’re busy, learning and figuring out things, flies faster. I aspire to live by this goal of constantly reflecting upon thyself, improving, analyzing what else can be done, what am I lacking etc etc.

In the past one and a half month or so, I, along the Commuity team was able to solve 210+ tickets on the Tor Project’s RT. At first, RT seemed a complex thing to handle, but, slowly things became more familiar and I was enjoying resolving tickets. My mentor helped me throughout the way. We used to discuss RT issues and challenges, and he’d also advice me how I could improve and do better.

I’ve learned quite a great deal about the Tor network, its configuration and cryptography, bridges, onion services, along with how to bypass censorship in countries that restrict basic freedom of internet users.

Tor Browser Release

As per the original timeline, Tor Browser 10.5 was supposed to be released on the first week of June. But due to some reasons, the release was delayed to the 6th of July. So, what we did instead was, changed the order of the priorities a little bit, and shifted our focus onto the Request Tracker, creating and updating user templates and composing the User Feedback Report. This report puts together all the major UI/UX usabailty pain points faced by users of Tor and Tor Browser. It covers a wide variety of topics ranging from UI/UX to circumventing censorship, and so forth.

Tor Browser has now changed. With the new user interface, the connecting is different and it’s obvious many users are going to get confused around it. While documenting such changes, our primary focus has always been to deliver content that is not complicated, and also precise enough to convey all details. This is a crucial time. Last week we updated the Tor browser Manual to reflect the new connecting experience and visualized the new changes. My focus for the remaining half will be to fix issues, document improvements and updates and continue the work with the RT.