[tor-relays] How to Run Torservers.net

[Julian Wissmann]

> Am Mittwoch, 11. Juli 2012, 14:33:55 schrieb Moritz Bartl:
>> 6) Be quick in answering abuse. We receive a very small number of
>> complaints, given that we run high bandwith nodes. I am actually
>> still surprised how few complaints we get. Roughly 80% are
>> automated reports, which we ignore, and for the rest it is
>> usually good enough to send our default template. See
>> https://www.torservers.net/wiki/abuse/templates and
>> https://www.torservers.net/wiki/abuse/dmca
>> 
> Can you tell how many abuse messages you receive per week?
> 
> Regards

Short answer: ~110 of which we ignore 105
Long answer:
About 15 automated abuses from MediaSentry, Icecat, IP-Echelon and the
likes per day, which we used to automatically answer, but don't bother
about, any more.
Then there are celepar.pr.gov.br and SpamCop from whom we receive the
occasional email and an average of 4-5 regular, "legit" abuse
mails/calls per week. Those are not evenly distributd however! There
are certain "abuse peaks" where we get a lot followed, usually, by
getting none for some time. I also have a feeling (needs confirmation
by me sitting down and plotting our abuses) that it has been getting
less abuse mails over the last year.

Overall those add up to ~110 abuse mails a week of which 105 are
automated and belong to senders who apparently don't care about what
we do/don't care about getting an answer at all/don't react in any
way, like MediaSentry who weren't even reachable by phone.
There are of course, also legit automated abuse mails - I've once had
a wonderful conversation with a guy who apparently also hosts a Tor
node after one of his system's ids sent an email to us, which I replied.

Then there are those few abuses from real people. Those can be
anything from Police inquiries from all over the world, Interpol,
Companies, normal People. Regular subjects frange from Spam and DDoS
to hacked mail accounts and stuff like that. Every few months there is
stuff like harrassment, threats and credit card fraud. There have
however also been police inquiries about terrorism and murder. Gladly
those have been non-recurring, unique events though and I hope it
stays that way.

So about those automated abuses. We took that seriously in the
beginning, answering them, trying to establish contact, explain what
we do. Usually people on the other end were like "We don't care", so
we started ignoring them and yeah, they really don't care and also
won't stop sending stuff.
There have been a few noteworthy exceptions though, like a guy whom
I've had a conversation with after answering an email from his IDS.
Turned out, he hosted a Tor node himself.
So sending a template answer that explains Tor and stuff once or twice
to automated mails can't be wrong, but afterwards its probably okay to
just start ignoring them, if there's no reaction.

Abuses from real people - Important. Answer! We have templates for the
standard situations, otherwise we write specific responses. We try to
answer within 24h, which works 98% of the time.
Often these inquries also result in conversations, some short, some
long, some people just wanting more info, some being supportive of
what we do and some very emotional (usually in a negative way). Some
even resulted in hate mails for months.
There are a few unfortunate ones, however. I speak English, German and
a little French, as does everyone else answering abuses at Torservers,
so whenever an email in any other language comes in we usually ask to
resend the request in one of those three languages, else we have to
ignore it.

Julian