Hello Tor, hello world!

Below you'll find the highlights of Tor metrics team work done in October 2017.

On behalf of the Tor metrics team, Karsten

Received funding [1] for some very important metrics work for the upcoming 12 months. This funding will allow us to document why we chose to do data collection, aggregation, and presentation the way we do. It also lets us specify how we're aggregating data on a level of detail that will be sufficient for others to reproduce our aggregated numbers. Initial work done with this funding is an internal collection of related questions from mailing lists and initial thoughts on structuring the documents to be written.

[1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor13

Attended the Tor meeting in Montreal and discussed the metrics team roadmap for the next 12 months, which will be finalized and published in November.

Released CollecTor 1.4.0, metrics-lib 2.1.1, and Onionoo 4.2-1.6.0 [2] to publish the build revision of the software running on a particular Onionoo or Collector instance. Released CollecTor 1.4.1 and Onionoo 4.2-1.6.1 [3] to handle unusually structured (but valid) descriptors.

[2] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-October/012479.html [3] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-October/012526.html

Started work on metrics-bot [4], a tool to provide insights into data collected by the metrics team through Twitter [5], Mastodon [6] and IRC to boost awareness and community engagement.

[4] https://people.torproject.org/~irl/metrics-bot/ [5] https://twitter.com/TorAtlas [6] https://botsin.space/@metricsbot

Improved Tor Atlas by adding an alert to suggest updating Tor version on outdated relays, and also a link to the relay lifecycle blog post when a relay is less than 2 weeks old to help new operators understand more [7]. A change was also made to prepare for the removal of the $ prefixes for family fingerprints, making it easier to copy/paste these fingerprints into shell scripts [8].

[7] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/23767 [8] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/22261