[tor-relays] How to diagnose lack of traffic on bridge?

[Steve Snyder]

I have a bridge that gets no traffic.  I don't mean "hardly any" traffic; I mean none.

The contents of bridge-stats are always empty except for the date, which advances once per day.  In the state file the last date, apart from daily accounting entries, is a EntryGuardAddedBy entry from 09 Sep 2012.  Yeah, that's six weeks ago.

The log file contains only a weekly notice of log file rotation and a daily notice of bandwidth self-test.  I never see errors or even warnings in the log.

My bridge is not unstable.  It has been running continuously for the last 25 days, which is pretty typical for this bridge.

I understand that bridges can be identified and their IP addresses blocked.  But I am not lacking traffic just from China, or just from Iran, or just from any other entity.  It doesn't seem likely that my IP address has been blacklisted by *everybody*.

I am also aware that the bridge authorities seem to favor handing out some addresses more than others.  Really, though, this IP address is never given out at all?  What are the odds of that?

On the rare occasions that I restart the bridge, I see in the log that my ORPort is reachable from outside and that my server descriptor is being published.  That's nice.  Also, I am running the current stable version of Tor, so it is not a matter of obsolete software.

How can I diagnose the failure of my bridge to garner any traffic?

Thanks.