[tor-relays] Help Turkmens to bypass Internet censorship: run an obfs4 bridge!

[Gary C. New]

Gus,
Is there a preferred Bridge Distribution Mechanism?
Within the last couple of months, I've added several obfs4 bridges (latest version) to the Tor network, which seem to meet the requested criteria, but they still don't appear to be receiving traffic.
I originally set the Bridge Distribution Mechanism to "moat." However, after a month of not receiving traffic, I modified them to "any." Unfortunately, my obfs4 bridges' Bridge Distribution Mechanism is still reporting as "None" in the consensus.
   
   - Transport protocols
      - obfs4
   - Bridge distribution mechanism
      - None

I have confirmed that I am able to manually connect and successfully browse using the obfs4 bridges in question.
Suggestions?
Respectfully,

Gary—
This Message Originated by the Sun.
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    On Wednesday, March 22, 2023, 1:25:26 PM MDT, gus <gus at torproject.org> wrote:  
 
 Dear Relay operators community,

The parliamentary elections in Turkmenistan are coming up very soon on
March 26th[1], and the Turkmen government has tightened internet censorship
and restrictions even more. In the last few months, the Anti-censorship
community has learned that different pluggable transports, like
Snowflake, and entire IP ranges, have been blocked in the country.
Therefore, running a bridge on popular hosting providers like Hetzner,
Digital Ocean, Linode, and AWS won't help as these providers' IP ranges
are completely blocked in Turkmenistan.

Recently, we learned from the Anti-censorship community[2] and via Tor user
support channels that Tor bridges running on residential connections
were working fine. Although they were blocked after some days or a week,
these bridges received a lot of users and were very important to keep
Turkmens connected.

How to help Turkmens to access the Internet
===========================================

You can help Turkmens to access the free and open internet by running an
obfs4 Tor bridge! But here's the trick: you need to run it on a
residential connection -- you won't need a static IPv4 --, and it would
ideally be run on more robust hardware than just a Raspberry Pi
(although that can help, we have found they can get overloaded).

You can set up an obfs4 bridge by following our official guide:
    https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/bridge/

After you setup a new bridge, you can share your bridge line with the
Tor support team at frontdesk at torproject.org, and we will share it with
users.

A complete bridge line is composed of:

    IP:OBFS4_PORT FINGERPRINT cert=obfs4-certificate iat-mode=0

Check this documentation to learn how to share your bridge line:
https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/bridge/post-install/

Just sharing your bridge fingerprint is not the best, but it's fine.

You can read more about censorship against Tor in Turkmenistan here:
  - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/issues/40029
  - Snowflake blocked:
    https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/issues/40024

Thank you for your support in helping to keep the internet free and open
for everyone.

Gus

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Turkmen_parliamentary_election
[2] https://ntc.party/c/internet-censorship-all-around-the-world/turkmenistan/17
https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/80

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