Hi,
I think that irc feed of recent changes is working great, but there is
still a lot of space for improvement.
As Ryan Lane suggested once, we could probably use system of queues
instead of irc which would be even more advanced. My suggestion is to
create some kind of feed that would be in machine parseable format,
like XML
This feed would be distributed by some kind of dispatcher living on
some server, like
feed.wikimedia.org and offering not just recent
changes but also a recent history (for example last 5000 changes per
project)
In case that service which is parsing this feed would be down for a
moment, it could retrieve a backlog of changes.
The current feed
irc.wikimedia.org should stay, but we could change it
so that the current bot is retrieving the data from new xml feed
instead of directly from apaches.
There's been a request for years to provide this data with XMPP.