Run an official badge-image server (like Shields.io)

[anko]

The Shields specification and the community-run Shields.io server allow adding easily scannable info images (SVG, even) to your readme.md. I'm sure you've seen these:

You can create ones with arbitrary text and colours, but the server can also automatically generate ones that match the current build status, most recent version published on a package manager, etc. (There's a list here.)

They are very popular: a search for "img.shields.io" currently shows 286,042 code results. Various services supply their own badges. Occasionally also to the point that the shields.io server hiccups under the weight of their popularity (badges/shields#529), making lots of repositories on Github show broken or slowly-loading images, which looks bad.

I'd like to see Github address this by running an official Github badge server on their more reliable infrastructure. Badges are clearly popular and useful, and people associate Github repositories with them. The shields service code is CC0 public domain.

[anko]

I received a reply from Nick at Github Support. Relevant excerpt:

Yeah, I agree that would be a neat feature -- I'll pass your suggestion to the team to consider but I can't make any promises.

[Foorack]

This would be ideal in my opinion. The shields.io server is down once again.

[calidion]

+1

[pmonks]

+∞

[anko]

Update in case you're following this issue but not badges/shields#529: Shields.io maintainer @espadrine wrote a great email to Github and got a more concrete reply.

In summary, they've acknowledged Shields.io's usefulness, bumped its API rate limit, and have started an internal discussion seeking a “long-term solution”.