Please can you either fix or disable this hook? It is getting really irritating to have a mail bounce notification every commit.

Removing the old CIA.vc hooks first would be a better start (hopefully temporarily), just to stop the insane flow of failure messages. As ESR said, it was over-engineered and many things were never completed. And it has looked like abandonware for a number of years now. But it would be good if CIA.vc comes back, in some form, as it was an interesting concept. I think their idea was far more expansive than irker by covering more than just IRC. For example the web front-end for a centralised view of the majority of all open source projects, with project stats to measure project health, as well as and commit histories for projects or individuals.

Irker also looks to be quite interesting, and would be good to have if it's not too hard to set up the server and add the hooks for Gna! And worrying about abandoned software shouldn't be an issue as I'm sure ESR would kick himself into action if the project started to stagnate ;) Personally for my Gna! projects, the IRC functionality is not needed due to the low commit traffic but for other old or new projects, this should be interesting.

This problem still persists.

For the record, in the meantime we chose to configure our project in CIA.vc to "Connect to a public Subversion repository" and subscribed the ping address provided there to our commits mailing list.

This is probably not terribly optimal since it results in CIA.vc querying the SVN repository itself after each commit, but it works as a stopgap measure until the actual hook can be updated.

It appears that the CIA bot hook for Subversion repositories used at Gna.org hasn't been able to contact the CIA notifications server for a while. Since they moved servers a few days ago, cia.vc (which is the hostname that repository hooks should use) now points to a new and current host IP, and cia.navi.cx (used by old hook configurations) is no longer up to date and presumably never will be.

Additionally, the mail server at cia.vc only started working again a few hours ago.

Since Gna.org's Subversion repositories (or at least, the Battle for Wesnoth project's repository) appear to be unable to contact CIA and get their notifications through, I assume that Gna.org's hook is configured to contact cia.navi.cx instead of cia.vc. In order to get that hook to work again, its configuration should be changed to point to cia.vc instead.

Additionally, the CIA admins advise the use of the XML-RPC method instead of emails, which they claim have not been properly supported for years and was in fact completely non-functional for a few days recently. If the Subversion CIA hook version that Gna.org is using supports XML-RPC, someone might want make sure that it is the method actually in use.