On 21-01-2026 10:00, Sebastian Hahn via tor-relays wrote:
On 21. Jan 2026, at 05:36, forest-relay-contact--- via tor-relays <tor-relays@lists.torproject.org> wrote:

Sebastian Hahn wrote:

What do you mean with "somewhat recent"? This has been done since at
least 2011 for security reasons, for compatibility reasons much longer.

I suspect he's referring to the recent choice to mark a minor upgrade as
critical. I think it was the update from .18 to .19? Whatever it was, it
led to a large number of relays getting a flag on Tor Metrics indicating
that they were dangerously out of date and not recommended.

Well, this is quite different, as getting a notification about running a
version which is no longer recommended does not mean the relay is
excluded from participating in the network in any way. Also, that's not
a new policy, we've been doing recommended version updates for well over
a decade now - and it was always possible to recommend a fresh update,
whether that coincides with a new major version or not.

Cheers
Sebastian
Hello,

The "somewhat recent" policy I refer to is the Relay EOL policy [1], first announced in 2019 [2].  

We are interested in the systematic removal of relays that reached end-of-life from the network.  The policy is not very recent (6 years old), but compared to the history of Tor, this is relatively recent.  Some Tor versions were already excluded from the network before this policy because of security issues or bugs, but our main interest here is the 2019's Relay EOL policy.

Regards,
Jules Dejaeghere

[1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/team/-/wikis/Relay-EOL-policy/
[2] https://blog.torproject.org/removing-end-life-relays-network/