Modify "Total consensus weights across bandwidth authorities" graph to only include relays that end up in the consensus
This suggestion is based on a discussion with arma and Sebastian in #tor-dev:
07:00:41 <+armadev> would be interesting to compare to: "the sum of moria1's
votes about each relay that ended up in the consensus"
07:00:51 <+armadev> since that would compare between bwauths better
07:01:12 <+armadev> right now if moria1 knows about a bunch of relays that used
to be around, but aren't now, and other dir auths don't
know about them, then moria1 votes a much higher total
So, it does seem plausible that the totals by authority would be more useful if the underlying set of relays is the same.
One issue is a technical one: we'd need to retain much more data in the database to implement this graph. The background is that we always need to match relays in a vote with the corresponding consensus in order to decide whether to include a relay in the total sum or not. However, we do not require descriptors to appear in a certain order, and we want the end result to be the same even if we process a consensus or vote a couple days or even weeks later.
Another, minor issue is that we'd have to reprocess the entire archive. This is doable and shouldn't stop us. Just saying that it's going to require some effort.
Are there alternatives, like only including relays from votes that have the Running flag?
Maybe we should run this analysis once and separate from metrics-web and then decide.
teor, juga, pastly, you were all involved in #25459 (moved) which led to the original graph. What do you think about this possible modification?