Hello people,

I'm sending you an email because your bridges are hardcoded in the pluggable transport bundles.

We recently added PT-specific metrics in metrics.torproject.org Specificaally, you can see a graph of PT users here: https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-bridge-transport

If you select the obfs2 transport, you can see that it displays only 300 users, which is not entirely true. We suspect that the reason for the low number of users is because not many bridges are reporting PT statistics to the bridge authorities. This might be for two reasons:

a) Your bridge might be configured to be private, that is to not publish its descriptor. This might happen if you have 'PublishServerDescriptor' set to 0 in your torrc. If you have a bridge hardcoded in the bundles, not publishing your descriptor doesn't really provide any security (your bridge is exposed anyway), so you might as well start publishing your descriptor, since this will allow us to gather statistics about the number of users you see.

b) Your Tor might not be bleeding edge: Tor only started reporting PT statistics to the auths in tor-0.2.5.1. To upgrade to this version of Tor you can use either the git master or the automated Debian package builds (see https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2014-February/003899.html for how to use them).

c) You don't have Extended ORPort enabled. With recent versions of Tor, you can enable it by adding 'ExtORPort auto' to your torrc.

It would be great if you could fix the above so that your Tor can start submitting statistics!

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me!