Tools/Stats manager...
A quality stats source is absolutely essential to the successful delivery of your mixmaster messages. You may have hoped you wouldn't have needed to get your hands dirty with this type of thing, but I assure you, you'll face this sooner or later. That's why I'm providing this small primer--for your benefit. Please use it and learn. I'll be very pissed if I get a request for support on this topic, and you have ignored the help.
Here's the problem. You've encountered a mixmaster error such as No Reliable Remailers!--or for some other reason you want or need to change your stats source. Unfortunately, some are not near as good as others. I wish I could give you, oh... a list of top five stats sources, but you might be reading this, years after I've written it. The network is always changing. New remailers come online and old ones die off. Most remailers are also sources for remailer stats. I'll try to give you the necessary info to select a good one should that be necessary.
This page is dedicated to helping you pick a good stats source. However, before going on, let me just say, all you really have to do to change sources is select another from the list provided in the Stats Manager. Hey, that might solve your problem. There's no guarantee it's a good site, but maybe you're pressed for time and later you'll return here and seriously seek a good source.
Allpingers.txt
QS uses this listing of available stats sources for it's updating purposes. It has all the sources, and for each source, all the URLs to pages it provides. You just select which source. At the time I write this (01/24/10) the default is banana. That doesn't mean it's still a good choice at the time you read this. Allpingers.txt is available from only a one place, online: www.noreply.org. The current obe can be examined at online: allpingers.txt. This site provides a wealth of remailer statistical info and is well worth a look now and then to familiarize yourself with it's contents. It is dedicated 100% to the remailer network. Take a look here for more information on allpingers.txt.
So, How do I know a good source from a bad one?
Sources derive their statistical info from sending out a constant stream of test messages. Some sources are more successful in this endeavor than others. The best method for choosing the source is to make a visual comparison of the mlist.txt files available from all sources. Compare them to each other and compare to this sample mlist.txt. By doing this you'll see clearly that not all sources are created equal. In the Stats Manager, select each source in turn and download it's pages. When asked if you want to save downloaded pages, reply No, for now. You'll want to save the pages when you decide which source you'll use in the future.
What do I look For?
Basically, that's all there is to it. You may have thought, at first, this was far to technical for your tastes. It's not. It's really pretty simple. This is something you'll have to face sooner or later. If you've gotten this far on the page, you're doing Ok. You won't need to feel helpless when you can't send mail.
Ok, my allpingers.txt is messed up and www.noreply.org is down or gone for good!
First--is it down or gone for good? I'd check back later to see if it's back. Hopefully, it will be. If you decide it is gone for good, you can still continue. Go the the newsgroup alt.privacy.anon-server and look over the posts. Possibly someone else has recently asked about stats sources. If not, you can post a message of your own, asking for help in getting a list together. Taking that info, format the items exactly as in the sample allpingers.txt. The only pages you are interested in (as listed on the page) are the mlist, mixring, and rlist. You might throw in pgpring, but you won't use it. All other pages can be ignored. Save the newly constructed file to allpingers.txt in the QS home directory. Then go to the Stats Manager, select a source from those you listed, and update all pages.