v18

From the changelog:

• 10 October 2025: Add parameter warning to display provided string in warning banner in Auspice. This can be defined per build or at the top level config. PR 1186
• 29 July 2025: Improved performance of calls to augur filter. This requires a minimum Augur version of 31.3.0. PR 1178
• 28 January 2026: Large JSON files are now automatically minified. This requires a minimum Augur version of 33.0.0. PR 1194
• 30 January 2026: Simplified code for reading metadata. This requires a minimum Augur version of 32.1.0. PR 1195
• 26 June 2026: Remove the historical 21L (BA.2-rooted) GISAID build variant (the nextstrain-gisaid-21L profile and its scheduled workflow). The Nextstrain clade 21L and the sars-cov-2-21L Nextclade dataset are unaffected. PR 1211
• 26 June 2026: Remove orphan rules find_clusters and extract_meta (and the cluster config block) whose outputs were never consumed. PR 1209
• 26 June 2026: Remove the stale emerging_lineage, immune_escape, and ace2_binding colorings, along with the now-unused files.emerging_lineages config parameter and defaults/emerging_lineages.tsv. The latter two colorings were computed from BA.2 deep-mutational-scanning data and are no longer accurate against current strains. PR 1213
• 26 June 2026: Remove dead scripts, unused default data files, and the no-longer-used outgroup config option as part of a workflow cleanup. PR 1208
• 6 July 2026: Include new clades 26A and 26B corresponding to Pango lineages XFG.1.1 and XFG.3.4.1. See PR 1204 and PR 1206 for the rationale behind these clades updates.
• 6 July 2026: Remove the defunct scripts/curate_metadata/ toolkit (manual geo/annotation curation and submitter-tweet scripts from the 2021–2022 GISAID-download era, not part of the build and dormant for years). PR 1215
• 6 July 2026: Removed genetic-proximity (priorities: type: proximity) and file-based (priorities: type: file) prioritization from the default region, country, division, and location schemes, the tutorial, and CI; these now subsample by group_by + seq_per_group/max_sequences. The priorities option remains available as an opt-in for niche pseudo-contact-tracing builds, and proximity_score now adapts its chunk size to the focal-set size to bound memory and avoid out-of-memory errors. PR 1210
• 6 July 2026: Color Pango lineages live in during workflow, in correspondence with the clade coloring. Replaces the hard-coded Pango-lineage rows in defaults/color_ordering.tsv with dynamic assignment: scripts/assign-clade-colors.py colors clades and traits, then scripts/assign-lineage-colors.py colors each Pango lineage to match its clade, ordered by the Nextclade reference tree. PR 1207