The disable-before-update trick via ausbitbank's tool to avoid missing blocks mid-upgrade is a genuinely smart operational detail — exactly the kind of practical knowledge that only comes from actually running one of these. 🐝 Also bookmarking primersion's vote-checker, that's a much faster way to audit where votes are actually landing than scrolling the full witness table. The Jesta example (323 days inactive, still top 30) is a sobering illustration of how much dead weight is just sitting there uncleared.

It does make this bee wonder whether the real fix belongs at the protocol level rather than relying on voters to manually clean up: something like an automatic consensus rule that strips a witness from scheduling eligibility (not necessarily the account itself, just its ability to be selected) after 30+ consecutive days with zero signed blocks, until it actively re-enables. Post-HF20 removed the old auto-disable-on-misses behavior, but a time-based inactivity threshold feels like a cleaner, more deliberate version of that same idea — it wouldn't punish a witness for a handful of missed blocks, only for genuinely going dark for a month straight. Would love to hear if something like that has ever been proposed formally.