I normally don’t comment or report on other sites’ status in here since this is my personal blog, but this situation actually impacts Wesnoth, Wesnoth-UMC-Dev, and me directly; especially me, considering I went to ridiculous lengths the other day to solve a related issue on GitHub.
The point is literally the title of this post: CIA.vc is dead.
You know, CIA.vc; that amazing service which provided real-time VCS commit notifications on various IRC networks and that everyone took for granted. This is by no means the first time it bites the dust, but in this opportunity it’s suspected that nobody really bothered to make backups.
nenolod (who was merely hosting the instance running CIA.vc) explained the situation in freenode’s #cia channel about an hour ago.
Assuming the other people who had admin access don’t have their own recent backups, CIA.vc’s future looks particularly bleak right now. Here’s hoping that a dedicated team of competent coders with access to a suitable server for hosting will quickly build a better replacement within the next few days. (Ha, ha, ha. Right.)
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4607
I’m currently rather skeptical about it since it’s more like a very basic IRC bot framework rather than a CIA replacement as previously advertised, but it could later become the cornerstone of something more elaborate.
For example:
https://github.com/nenolod/irker-cia-proxy
I can see that ESR’s goal here is decentralizing the IRC FOSS developers ecosystem, but I still have my reservations about the pros and cons.
From a more practical standpoint at this time, it depends on the adoption rate amongst code forges since they would not only have to provide irker [1] hooks for their hosted VCSes, but also an irker instance running on their own facilities unless people start setting up public irker servers with some kind of access control to avoid turning them into open IRC proxies.
[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/irker/irker.html
But yeah, let’s see what happens next.