Let bridges indicate when they don't want BridgeDB to distribute their address
Right now, bridges can decide whether they want to be a public bridge that gets distributed via BridgeDB or a private bridge that only gets used by clients who learn its address via some other, private channel. The default is that a bridge is a public bridges, unless it sets PublishServerDescriptor 0 in its torrc file. This works fine with respect to BridgeDB not distributing private bridges. But a lesser known problem is that a bridge that doesn't publish its descriptor also does not contribute to bridge usage statistics on Metrics that are based on bridge extra-info descriptors.
The major use case that comes to mind is a bundled bridge whose address is shipped together with Tor Browser or another application. In the past we tried to remind operators of these bridges to also publish descriptors, so that their statistics are included on Metrics. But it turns out that some censors, who carefully scrape bridge addresses from BridgeDB, do not extract bridge addresses from the various bundles. Still, bundled bridges see a large number of bridge users and we should really include them in the statistics.
Another use case could be private bridges that somebody sets up for themselves and their friends. Maybe these operators would be fine contributing to the statistics if that doesn't automatically mean they need to share their bridge with other users.
I think this feature is relatively easy to build. We would need:
- a new descriptor line "bridgedb off", or something even more intuitive and extensible, that tells BridgeDB that this bridge's address should not be distributed,
- a new torrc option or extension of an existing option, maybe "PublishServerDescriptor bridge-auth" or, again, something more intuitive, to include the line above in the descriptor, and
- an extension of BridgeDB to ignore bridges with this line when parsing descriptors.