[tor-relays] Tor Weather has been discontinued

[Eran Sandler]

I have played quite a bit with onionoo and wrote a wrapper in Go for it.

I am willing to rewrite Tor Weather using Go (or python if you like).

I'll go over the old code and this email again to make sure I understand
the full scope of the project.

As an operator I have relied on the Tor Weather alerts to know if one if my
nodes were down and while it's wasn't quick enough in sending alerts it was
a good tool.

I have some ideas about the t-shirts alerts so that we won't miss sending
to those that need it and wouldnt send to those that don't need it.

Eran

On Mon, Apr 4, 2016, 17:49 Karsten Loesing <karsten at torproject.org> wrote:

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>
> Dear relay operators,
>
> as of April 4, 2016, Tor Weather has been discontinued.
>
> Tor Weather [0] provided an email notification service to any user who
> wanted to monitor the status of a Tor node.  Upon subscribing, they
> could specify what types of alerts they would like to receive.  The
> main purpose of Tor Weather was to notify node operators via email if
> their node was down for longer than a specified period, but other
> notification types were available, including one where operators would
> be informed when their node was around long enough to qualify for a
> t-shirt.
>
> The main reason for discontinuing Tor Weather is the fact that
> software requires maintenance, and Tor Weather is no exception.  Tor
> Weather was promising t-shirts for relays that have not been around
> long enough or that provided too little bandwidth to be useful to the
> network, and it was almost impossible to deny a t-shirt after Tor
> Weather has promised it.  Apart from that, Tor Weather was likely not
> offering t-shirts to people who have long earned it, thereby confusing
> them.  An unreliable notification system is worse than not having a
> system at all.  Relay operators shouldn't rely on Tor Weather to
> notify them when their relay fails.  They should rather set up their
> own system instead.
>
> We have tried to find a new maintainer for Tor Weather for years, but
> without success.  We started rewriting Tor Weather [1] using Onionoo
> [2] as data back-end in 2014, and even though that project didn't
> produce working code, somebody could pick up this efforts and finish
> the rewrite.  The Roster developers said that they're planning to
> include an email notification function in Roster [3].  And we
> developed a simple Python script that provides information about a
> relay operator's eligibility for acquiring a t-shirt [4].  None of
> these alternatives is a full replacement of Weather, though.
>
> We encourage you, the community of Tor relay operators, to step up to
> start your own notification systems and to share designs and code.
> Tor Weather is still a good idea, it just needs somebody to implement it.
>
> Tor Weather is discontinued in two steps.  For now, new subscriptions
> are disabled, new welcome messages are not sent out anymore, and
> existing subscriptions continue working until June 30, 2016.  From
> July 1, 2016 on, Tor Weather will not be sending out any emails.
>
> Sorry for any inconvenience caused by this.
>
> All the best,
> Karsten
>
>
> [0] https://weather.torproject.org/
>
> [1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/weather-in-2014
>
> [2] https://onionoo.torproject.org/
>
> [3] http://www.tor-roster.org/
>
> [4]
> https://gitweb.torproject.org/metrics-tasks.git/tree/task-9889/tshirt.py
>
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