Dancer was developed primarily to fit the needs of the freenode
network. With freenode's recent decision that they are no longer
interested in the features they once asked for (reliable, race-proof
services that properly integrate channel access and user
authentication, resiliance to lower-level transport problems that
would effectively eliminate netsplits, integration with external
projects, internationalisation, and something resembling secure
authentication), and with no other feature requests or bug reports in
many months, there is no longer anything left that needs to be done.

As such, development on dancer is unexpectedly but effectively halted
due to the project being complete. It may or may not resume again in
the future, but don't expect to see any new releases any time soon,
unless somebody comes up with some new bugs.

The last, and therefore current releases are dancer-ircd 1.0.36 and
dancer-services 1.8.0.6.9.

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Personally, I am rather surprised by this; I was expecting to continue
developing and maintaining dancer for a few more years, given the
absence of anybody else willing to do it. Freenode's sudden
disinterest in developing the server software makes no sense to me,
and my questions about the reasons for this have been ignored.

I have other things on my todo list that are more immediate
priorities, but at some point I intend to revisit the problem and
build a system which implements all this stuff, without the need to
construct an organisation to manage it (since no such organisation
exists and I have no real desire to create one). But that will
probably be two or three years in the future.

Meanwhile, bugs and feature requests for dancer from its other users
can be sent to me at asuffield@suffields.me.uk; I'll consider them,
although I don't know how much time I'll have to deal with them.

Please do not contact me about issues with Freenode; I can't help
you. Freenode doesn't run the release versions, but rather uses some
private patches for undisclosed reasons.
