[tor-relays] T-shirts and Confirming Relay Control

[Roger Dingledine]

Matt: Thanks for leading us forward on the tshirt topic! I still, alas,
have a pile of tshirt requests from Jan-Mar that I should collate and
forward to you.

On Sun, May 03, 2015 at 10:26:52AM -0800, I wrote:
> Isn't the value of the t-shirt disproportionate to the trouble you're
>going to to give them out?
> If the weather message offering the t-shirt is answered by the same
>address isn't that proof enough?

I think I agree with this: if somebody has a copy of a Tor weather
mail, then they -- oh. You can sign up to watch somebody else's relay,
and then you get their tshirt notification?

I guess the obvious fix is to only have weather send tshirt notifications
when it has auto-parsed the contact info itself, rather than when a
human signs up to watch a given relay.

But the obvious fix involves changing Tor Weather. It's my understanding
that we have a rewrite already done by a GSoC student, but nobody has
attempted to deploy the rewrite because nobody wants to mess with the
current weather instance (and because Karsten, the original mentor,
is overloaded).

Tor Weather should really be a community thing, not a service that
Tor maintains, given how we're stretched thin as it is.

I met a nice fellow in Valencia who lives in Berlin and offered to pick
it up. But I haven't heard anything further from that conversation.

Really, Weather is messy because it tries to serve many too many purposes
at once -- two of the extremes are letting people sign up to get email
when their relay goes offline, and also tracking historical relay uptime
data in order to tell us (and the operator) when a given relay has passed
a given milestone.

Of course, making it a community thing could easily mean even more
inconsistency over time. "Hm" indeed.

--Roger