ORPort different from 443 and 80, will I actually help anyone?

Question

I have set up my relay as per this link

I have one question. Since I have set ORPort 63547, will I actually help anyone? I run a web server, so ports 80 and 443 and other ports are sadly out of the questions.

Answer 1

The only time an "end user" will ever directly connect to your ORPort is when or if you are their guard, in those situations you might be able to help weakly censored users by providing it on a more common "TLS" port to help mask the true nature of the traffic.

However I'm not sure what kind of figures this subset of users (who aren't fully censored but have limited connection targets) actually mean in terms of numbers. In their case, they will select what they can connect to and not choose your relay as their guard.

I'd be more concerned with running on "common" ports to provide a bridge, rather than a relay. For most of the traffic you contribute to the network, you probably will not be being directly connected to by clients, but rather other relays which shouldn't have any problem talking to whichever port you want to use.

Answer 2

yes, you will : there are a lot of people who don't have a “Fascist Firewall”, as it stated in tor manual. Also - you can put obfs3/4 or Meek on port 443 if you want to help to circumvent censorship deeper. Feel free to ask more if you have a questions - I'll be glad to help!