[tor-relays] Call for setting up new obfs4 bridges

[Philipp Winter]

On Wed, Jul 03, 2019 at 02:38:03PM +0000, nottryingtobelame at protonmail.com wrote:
> Is it normal for bridges to see no traffic, and if they're not seeing
> any, should I keep them online?

A bit of background: When you set up a bridge, by default it reports
itself to BridgeDB, our system for bridge distribution.  Each bridge
falls in one of four BridgeDB "buckets": HTTPS, email, Moat, and
unallocated.  The unallocated bucket is the smallest of all four, and we
use it for manual distribution, meaning that we occasionally take these
bridges and hand them out to activists.  This doesn't happen often which
is why the unallocated bridges see the least use among all of BridgeDB's
bridges.  This is not ideal but it's the way things currently work.

There's a chance that your bridge ended up in the unallocated bucket but
it's unlikely that it did so four times in a row.  Since Tor version
0.3.2.3, you can express what bucket you want your bridge to be in, by
setting the BridgeDistribution option.

All that said, please feel free to send me your bridge info off-list.
I'll test it for you and check what bucket BridgeDB put it into, so
you'll see actual users this time.

Cheers,
Philipp