Launch of new Tor Weather service - tor-relays

30 Mar 2023


      Hello everyone!
As indicated on the last relay operator meetup we were close to 
re-launching the Tor Weather service. Now, after fixing a bunch of 
last-minute issues and double-checking everything is working we can 
finally announce that the newly designed Tor Weather service is ready 
for public usage.
Feel free to try it out at https://weather.torproject.org and help 
improving it!
For those not knowing what this service is about: Tor Weather is 
offering subscriptions to keep track of the well-being of relays. Right 
now, after registering an account, one can get an e-mail notification in 
case a relay goes down or loses some flags or goes below a certain 
amount of observed bandwidth. The idea is to help operators in managing 
their relays that way and showing them their contribution to our project 
is much appreciated.
There a many more things we can potentially offer subscriptions for, 
like getting notifications for upcoming relay operator meetups, having 
earned a Tor t-shirt, new relay requirements, running outdated Tor 
versions... You can find a current list of ideas in our bug tracker[1]; 
feel free to add missing ones and pick up issues to work on. This is a 
free software project after all. :)
We see Tor Weather as an investment into our relay operator community 
and think it will be useful in the future to help growing and 
strengthening our community, which is very exciting.
Finally, I'd like to give a big shout-out to Sarthik Gupta who did all 
the heavy-lifting and re-wrote Tor Weather during last years' Google 
Summer of Code and keeps improving it. Additionally, kez from our 
sysadmin team was invaluable in getting all the different pieces set up 
and running on our infrastructure.
Thanks as well to all the volunteers, like nusenu, who contributed with 
ideas and feedback over the years which convinced us that Tor Weather is 
a worthwhile tool to invest time and energy in again.
Georg
[1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/tor-weather/-/issues