(since this is not really part of that ticket I'm moving this reply to tor-dev)

Replying to [comment:21 virgil][1]:

Re: comment #15

...

2. there are no incentives for a relay operator to set it properly

Roster aims to fix this. http://tor-roster.org

Quite the opposite I think. tor-roster creates incentives for lazy operators because it does not require a proper MyFamily configuration to aggregate relays into a group.

tor-roaster's way to group relays (one mutual connection into a group of relays is enough iirc) does not match tor's definition of MyFamily.

While tor-roster's way to group actual set of relays to it's operator might represent a more accurate picture of reality than systems that do require proper MyFamily configs, it misses the possibility to create incentives for proper configurations.

For what it's worth, Roster also makes MyFamily a bit less painful to work with because the detected families are now robust to changes in the Family graph. For details see [3]

This causes the offset between tor's and tor-roster's interpretation/definition.

To give you an example, roster says this relay is part of a 24 relays group [4] even though it has only a mutual MyFamily with two other relays:

https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/E6E18151300F90C235D3809F90B31330737CEB...

Ideally tor-roster would make it very clear on their website that groups do not require a complete mutual MyFamily agreement between all relays in that group, or require proper MyFamily configuration to create incentives for properly configured families.

[1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6676 [3] ttps://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/16750 [4] http://tor-roster.org/family_detail/E26AFC5F718E21AC502899B20C653AEFF688B0D2