Should we be surprised?
Many moons ago, Y_Less's account suddenly lost status of beta tester. I wondered why, but I wasn't that much concerned, as he created ColeMiner account soon after - I just guessed he wanted to start fresh, just like some people create new account in games when they are bored of being too powerful in relation to everyone around. I didn't connect the dots when his repos dissapeared this time. However, his last post shedded some light onto that issue.
Addiction is a real problem. I should know that in particular, as almost everything I touch changes into my new addiction real quick. I've played on sa-mp RP servers in ~2007, I enjoyed it, but my inner programmer told me: "You can do better than this!". I roamed around polish pawn forums, then discovered official sa-mp forums in 2008 (ironically through foreach thread). Since then, I haven't played, but almost every day checked scripting help subforum, helping people, and looking for contracts. I almost lost my job once to help people for free on scripting help subforum!
Was it reasonable?
From what I've heard, quitting cold turkey is the best method to quit. I'm a smoker, and in my attempts to drop the habit it really was the best option. Time is the most valuable resource you have. If addiction steals it from you, then yes, doing anything to stop that is reasonable. Y_Less's legacy is something to envy, he changed servers of many people. His tutorials and patience are really helpful. Thanks to them I understand how PAWN works under the hood. However he trusted a little too much in redundancy, and the act of removing all of his threads was really low. Fortunately none of his works (well, except for some posts and threads) are lost, as he reuploaded them.
What should we do now?
With help of many people we managed to restore most of the important threads. Some are lost forever, as caching systems such as google cache and/or wayback machine don't hold everything. All repositories are back up, you can find their corresponding threads throught forums. It seems I'm in charge of YSI as of now (Y_Less is still lurking on github, helping with some issues). However, my knowledge of some things, such as @emit (it's a polymorphic P-code emitter, chaning memory at runtime, not to be confused #emit) is limited. Also, convoluted macros are a real headache to understand (thank god for Slice's PPG). I have a few ideas to upgrade current YSI, however my time is limited. I have a rent to pay, so most of my time I work my dayjob (moved from being webdev to webgl), and I script private samp server gamemodes.
So, YSI is dead?
Hey! Just because I have the most recent repository at the moment, doesn't mean it's abandoned! Everyone is welcome to raise issues, submit pull requests, and forking the repo (it's still covered under MPL license). I'm using YSI every day, and I'm more than keen to fix issues in YSI 4.0 (3.0 not so much, as 4.0 is upgrade over 3, BC breaks aren't everywhere). Also, there are over 25 libraries, from which I've personally (and directly) used no more than 20. Everyone can find something for themselves.
Conclusion
Someone said that Y_Less quitting is a good thing, because it had shown us that we can work as a team. I hope we can prove them right. My area of expertise is SQL and pure PAWN, however I have only basic-intermediate knowledge level about C++. Every kind of support is welcome, from adding an issue on github, to becoming owner of the freshest repository and maintainig it.