I'm only interested in providing directory authority operators with the information they need to fix problems with the voting process.
Hi Karsten. I'm going to focus on the monitors for now and come back to discussion of a website after Sebastian and Peter have a chance to respond. That said, we totally agree on this point - the goal of this project is solely to help detect and resolve issues with authorities and consensus generation. If the website is vital to that then great (I still think it should be its own repository, but it's then definitely worth keeping). However, if we can do just as well by including additional information in the warnings then that would be even more maintainable in the long term.
My thoughts on this are probably best explained by a tangent. For years I've run a sybil checker called consensusTracker.py [1]. This checker did a bit more than just watch for sybil attacks. It also generated a pretty html report of the wax and wane in relay counts over the week among other things.
While these bells and whistles were pretty, no one cared about them and rightfully so. The sole purpose of a sybil checker is to provide us a notification saying "Oi! Potential problem here, recent relay additions are...".
The html report, while pretty, was both useless and made the code far, far more complicated than it needed to be. Finally I replaced that 601 line script with a far simpler 116 line counterpart that does just what we want and nothing more [2]. The monitor is now more reliable, maintainable, and can easily be updated in the future when necessary (something I couldn't do with the mess that was the previous script).
The lesson that I learned from this was "Start with the ending goal of a project and code toward that. Anything else will just result in feature creep." This isn't to necessarily say the DocTor website is unnecessary (only the site's intended audience like Peter can tell us that), but I definitely think we should figure out what he needs before resolving to keep it.
Cheers! -Damian
[1] https://gitweb.torproject.org/atagar/tor-utils.git/blob/e537044:/consensusTr... [2] https://gitweb.torproject.org/atagar/tor-utils.git/commitdiff/9b7de30