I was on dread yesterday and they said that tor is needing more guard nodes because it's under a denial of service attack so if you can either run one or there are several places where you can apparently donate money and someone will run one for you then you should do that.
My relay has gone from running as primarily a guard to exclusively as a middle since the 14th. Why would it do that, if Tor needs more guards?
I have no clue. Keep in mind that's just what I read on dread. So take that with whatever grains of salt you prefer.
I just assumed they'd know more about it than me! I am very dumb, especially on the topics of cryptography.
I saw they removed some 600 guards that were running old end of life versions of tor. Was your contact information correct and have you checked that email?
I've gotten contacted before so I assume that's all gravy. Anyway, my relay is healthy and up to date as far as I can tell.
I do assume that me not being a guard anymore is just some automatic defensive mechanism that'll sort itself out in the long run; not too worried about it, just curious.
There's been a major DDoS against guard nodes lately as well, causing many of them to lose connecting clients so it may have been unaccessible for long enough that it kicked back to relay but I'd ask on the relay-operators mailing list/forum. They've been posting a lot of firewall rules and scripts to fend off attacks.
Yes definitely
The tor metrics page shows that the performance got worse around 15th of may: https://metrics.torproject.org/torperf.html
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