On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 4:04 PM, Roger Dingledine arma@mit.edu wrote:
Actually, I'd like us to take this opportunity to throw out the Named and Unnamed flags entirely.
I think we've done pretty well at teaching users to use $fingerprints rather than nicknames in the few cases where they actually want to specify a particular relay.
And only two-ish directory authorities still track and vote about Named
Second the idea of completely tossing names internally in favor of fingerprints.
It would be great to have somebody think through the implications of what exactly we'll lose by dropping them, so we can make a more informed decision. Maybe that could be one of you? :)
I've felt the real benefit of nicknames has always and only been in operator participation (woot, other than dns and http on my OR IP, I can feel good by having this short name string), and moniker recognition (hey, look at this metrics widget, I can search/spot all kinds of human readable cool nodes... maybe I'll run one or keep running mine, etc).
Nicknames, 'contact' and the like could be merged into new a formally structured user metadata descriptor field. Some fields of which might be used by applications such as onionoo to populate other empty fields. ie: 'udata nickname[16char]: email[32char]: uri[32char]: blurb[up to remaining n char limit]'