@teor

I hereby volunteer to maintain a FAQ for operators of small relays (or noob operators). Which means I would be watching this list, generating the Q&A and from time to time alerting this list to the appearance of new questions and answers, to allow knowledgeable people to do quality control. And/or inviting people to convert their answers on this list to the FAQ answers. This would relieve them from answering the same question over and over again and reduce the influx of questions from noobs (like myself J). I believe this would also strengthen the community and reduce the frustration of small relay operators and – who knows? – even lead to advancements in Tor design to make better use of them.

Caveat: I need someone (Tor project people) to create the Wiki on the site and let me admin it. There is already a severely underused wiki with a couple of answers that someone once referred me to, with a disastrously difficult captcha that I could not pass (why have captcha on a Wiki in the first place is beyond me)

-----Original Message-----
From: tor-relays [mailto:tor-relays-bounces@lists.torproject.org] On Behalf Of teor
Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2017 8:26 AM
To: tor-relays@lists.torproject.org
Subject: Re: [tor-relays] What's a "useful" relay?

> On 24 Dec 2016, at 18:56, Rana <ranaventures@gmail.com> wrote:

> ...

> What is needed is a standardized feedback on WHY the relay has such a low rating. This could cause at least part of the operators to take care of the bottleneck (eg moving the relay to another location, or abandoning the home relay and replacing it with a hosted one). And if the home relay is indeed as harmful as some people here think, the recommendation should be issued to shut it down, instead of leaving it hanging there doing nothing or even harming Tor. Such feedback could significantly improve the quality and effectiveness of Tor.

> Based on the discussion here, the people who run Dirauths and bwauths know very well (or at least can easily find out) the reasons for relays getting low rating - why not automate the communication of the reasons to relay operators in clear, unequivocal and actionable terms?

You could try compiling a FAQ from the answers you and others have received.

Or, someone could volunteer to create a relay performance analysis tool. But it might not be as simple as you think. There are many variables, and it's hard to work out what's actually happening to a relay without access to the relay itself.

> I get the feeling that people are trying to be "politically correct" here and it's a pity (although they DO respond fully and frankly when asked a direct question).

Perhaps some of us struggle to answer similar questions in the same level of detail all the time. I know I do. It takes a lot of time to elicit the level of detail needed to provide good answers.

Also when we're not polite, the discussion escalates into long threads with few interesting posts. So most of us learn to avoid that.

Tim Wilson-Brown (teor)

teor2345 at gmail dot com

PGP C855 6CED 5D90 A0C5 29F6 4D43 450C BA7F 968F 094B ricochet:ekmygaiu4rzgsk6n

xmpp: teor at torproject dot org

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