yes, stale mirrors should normally be dropped out of the list.

Can you provide full url(s) of the ones you are seeing there as being stale?

Thanks for reporting this...

The publiclist will show someone if they have some content that is current for that version (e.g. the initial package repository or ISOs). It doesn't remove them from the publiclist just because they might be a little behind. So F16 x86_64 updates may be behind, but if F16 x86_64 release is correct, then they'll appear in publiclist.

MM does remove a mirror directory if that one directory is stale, from yum mirrorlists. So yum and anything requested from download.fedoraproject.org/(path) should only take you to a mirror who has the corresponding (path) directory up-to-date.

The ANL mirror is certainly messed up. Its updates/ directory contains releases/ directory content but no updates/ content. I've emailed their system administrators.

Leaseweb.de mirror is marked inactive as it's quite stale. There's another ticket to investigate why MM isn't automatically detecting this.

Closing here now, and work to fix the underlying cause can continue in ticket:3278