In every continent, even in Europe, there are still country pools without any server registered in it. And sometimes pools with very low server count face similar situation while all of its servers drop out of publishing during transient problem. Currently querying these pools will give no results. Although discouraged in pool website, we cannot really forbid users trying to query these pools. As a fall-back measure, how about CNAME these zero-server pools toward its belonging continental pool?
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Personally I am for it.
That could work indeed. Although browsing trough, for some it may need to CNAME to global pool directly. 
I agree, its better to have the zones usable than not usable. Then more people hopefully will add servers that actually are located inside the country of the specific pool.
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Yup! That is the plan, I just haven’t gotten to it.
One of the last “projects” I did was new tooling to get logs and statistics from the DNS servers. The idea is to not just do this for “empty” zones, but figure out generally which zones have less servers than average for their load and then “fill in” servers from zones with extra capacity.
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Sounds like a grea idea but I wonder how you would implement a such idea?
The DNS system makes logs (and metrics) for how many DNS queries it gets from each country. Obviously that doesn’t quite correspond to NTP queries, but it should be a good proxy.
My plan is to calculate for each country with less than X servers (or X “net speed capacity”) how far off it is the median/average/some reasonable comparison country and then supplement with servers either from the global zone or that have explicitly joined some other “extra global” zone. (If we use the global zone I’ll add an option to remove a server from the global zone).
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Sounds like plan, if you need statistics from my 8 ntp servers tell me so.