Related to the blox* thread. When 0.2.0.3x was marked stable, I went through and mailed all the contacts running old versions. Some profusly thanked, some silently updated, some ignored.
It would be handy if... Upon marking and releasing a new stable branch, include in the release notes what the minimum recommended versions are and why [security breach, crashing, performance, needing to break backward compat going forward, etc]... only the really major reasons, just a few quotable lines. Some people were like, why bother? Make the contact field more of an encouraged option to use. Maybe only a third of nodes had valid addresses. Make Tor emit a logline hourly or at least daily when it notices that it is old. Much more likely to stick out like that. Perhaps graduate the verbosity/capitalization if it detects itself is not in the current stable branch or older. The torrc sample conf, man page, etc should mention the existance of or-talk at the top of the relay configuration sections as something operators should consider joining. Consider an or-operator list should operator specific volume here ever get high. As an aside, I never bothered to inquire of anyone why their node was so old. Those that offered it were: - get around to it - binary package/source deps/issues with their platform, user error - bizarre security/performance rationalizations
