-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
I guess it makes sense to make this change a bit more visible on the tor-relays mailing list since relay ops will notice the change eventually and not everyone is reading changelogs closely.
A lot of relays will loose their guard flag (and probably see less traffic?) once enough dir auths [1] upgraded to 0.2.5.6-alpha.
For the background see the changelog [2]:
o Minor features: - Authorities now assign the Guard flag to the fastest 25% of the network (it used to be the fastest 50%). Also raise the consensus weight that guarantees the Guard flag from 250 to 2000. For the current network, this results in about 1100 guards, down from 2500. This step paves the way for moving the number of entry guards down to 1 (proposal 236) while still providing reasonable expected performance for most users. Implements ticket 12690.
It will be interesting to follow the metrics graphs during that transition. I.e. will the guard bw history go down or will the remaining relays handle the same amount of traffic without any difference? (and similar questions) https://metrics.torproject.org/bandwidth.html#bandwidth-flags
[1] https://consensus-health.torproject.org/#authorityversions [2] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-July/034180.html