Allow ignoring certain consensus-health warnings
The consensus-health script produces some rather persistent warnings. For example, here's the most recent list of warnings:
WARNING: The following directory authorities are not reporting bandwidth scanner results: turtles
NOTICE: The certificates of the following directory authorities expire within the next two months: Faravahar 2013-08-09 03:46:54, maatuska 2013-08-06 07:58:18
NOTICE: The following directory authorities recommend other client versions than the consensus: moria1 -0.2.4.14-alpha
NOTICE: The following directory authorities recommend other server versions than the consensus: moria1 -0.2.4.14-alpha
People who watch the consensus-health list are well aware of these warnings and know that two certs expire in 1.5 months and that Roger has left Internet land for at least this week. That leaves just the first issue that somebody should get Mike to resolve.
The current approach to reduce noise is as follows: if there are no new warnings or if a warning persists for a given number of hours, don't send an email.
There should be an option to ignore certain warnings until a given timestamp. For example, I'd want to ignore expiring certs until mid-July and moria1 recommending different versions until next Monday. I'd like to edit a text file on yatei that contains the warning text and a timestamp until when to ignore this warning.
This list of ignored warnings should also be added to the consensus-health.html page, so that everyone can look up which warnings are currently ignored. The text file could also contain a comment saying why the warning is ignored and decide if that's a good idea or not.
Hopefully, this reduces noise even more and makes authority operators pay more attention to the consensus-health list again.