Add middle-only line to Relays by relay flag graph

[cypherpunks]

When looking at the declining number of tor relays [1]
I also looked at the relays by relay flag graph.
On that graph one can notice that guard relays are declining but exits are not,
but middle relays (no guard or exit flag) are declining even more and are unfortunately not explicitly on that graph.

Could you add them?

[1] ​https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2017-October/013364.html

[karsten]

In theory, yes. In practice, not easily. Here's what we'd have to do:

• Extend the servers.csv ​format to either accept flag combination in the flag column or deprecate the flag column and include a new set of columns: isexit, isguard, isfast, isstable, and ishsdir similar to what we're doing in bandwidth.csv.
• Extend the aggregation code to produce daily averages of relays having both the Exit and the Guard flag assigned.
• Optionally re-run the aggregation code on the network archive covering consensuses back to 2008, or live with the fact that the new middle-only line will start whenever the code is deployed (which would need to be documented for users).
• Extend the Relays by relay flag graph to display middle nodes as the number of Running minus the number of Exit and Guard flagged relays.

My guess is that your intuition was that just the last step is necessary to make this happen.

So, is that a "yes" or "no"? I think it's a "not yet". In our roadmap draft we're writing that "we decided to give [visualizations] less priority in the next 12 months, because it will be easier to improve these visualizations when things are more consolidated." And I think that applies here. It's a good idea, but it's really a lot of work for relatively small gain. I'll leave this ticket open anyway, but better don't hold your breath.

Thanks for the suggestion!