[network-health] Changes on the Tor Network - #31549

[David Goulet]

Hello All!

I've put a small set of people in CC that are involved in this change for now
so we can make good progress forward! (and not stall)

We are soon (some low values of "soon" hopefully) to reject all non supported
relays, by tor version, from the network:

    https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/31549

At this very point in time, this represents in total ~12.72% of the total
bandwidth weight thus roughly 1/8th of the network will be removed (in terms
of bandwidth capability).

In terms of "relay volume", this change will remove about ~1/7th of the total
network or 923/6349.

Roger already emailed hundred(s?) of operators to ask them to upgrade and many
have responded but as you can see, the total bandwidth weight has barely moved
:S.

Our nusenu volunteer also made it public on tor-relays@ mailing list:

    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2019-September/017711.html

So let say for a journalist, or our millions of users, this will mean a
"considerable" drop in the Metrics graph of total number of relays.
Fortunately, we can explain it :). So lets be pro-active!

I _strongly_ think we should do a blog post at minimum to tell the world what
is about to happen and not silently do this. It should have a clear, simple,
easy section of "If you run a relay, please upgrade by doing so ...".

Hopefully, with a bigger microphone, we'll be able to drop the 12.72% to
something much more acceptable.

We have _good_ reasons to do it so this is not a public debate but rather an
informative post.

I'm voluntering to help draft this but since I'm not a native English speaker,
I will need help.

@stephw: What do you think here? Advice on how to proceed?

Thanks!
David

-- 
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