Shutting down pad.okfn.org

#1

Hi all,

We are going to shut down pad.okfn.org.

Specifically, we’ll do the following, starting on April 3rd 2017:

  • Backup all pads as plain text (Using functionality built in to Etherpad)
  • Serve all the plain text files from an S3 bucket under the pad.okfn.org domain name. This means that all current data will continue to be accessible as read-only text. No new pads will be able to be created once the migration takes place
  • Recommend that people use other services for document collaboration. There are many: https://hackmd.io is one that some of us at Open Knowledge International (OKI) use, but, there are simply a plethora of options for document collaboration

Like several other changes we’ve made to OKI infrastructure this year, the reason for this change is that the use case for maintaining our own document collaboration service is not as pressing in an ecosystem of many alternatives, and it does not seem the best use of our resources to maintain such a service.

We hope you understand the change. Please add any questions or comments to this thread.

#2

Big :thumbsup: - great to simplify the set of services being hosted and there are many alternative options.

#3

I can recommend HackMD, especially in Free URL mode. This means you have to manually add your pad’s path to the service’s URI. Try it out at

For writing more structured documents, https://www.fiduswriter.org/ is a sound alternative to Google Docs even.

#4

uff… this is really bad news for us (Open Knowledge Finland)

I had missed this community announcement and there was no indication of the shut-down at the main page of the https://pad.okfn.org

We have just made integration to the mydata2017.org conference session pages so that the page content is collaboratively created in Etherpads and then automatically reflected to the conf session pages.

For example:

https://pad.okfn.org/p/consent-S1 --> http://mydata2017.org/session/consent-s1-210/

We would need the pads until the end of June (by which time the session descriptions are ready and moved to the conference pages), would it be anyhow possible to extend the usage time until that?

#5

Hi @apoikola

I can’t guarantee that pad.okfn.org will remain live until the end of June. It is only still live now as we had some higher priority items in our infrastructure queue to deal with.

pad.okfn.org costs over $150/month to keep up, and we still have lots of downtime on it with these resources assigned to it (bursts of activity bring the server down fairly regularly).

There are many collaborative platforms that you could port the pages to with relative ease, and that will be more stable to pull data from.

#6

If the question is about money we can pay the extra month.

I have not found an other platform which woud support wget friendly raw
html… if you can suggest some we will look at it.

Br,

-Jogi

#7

Hi all,

We just changed the DNS servers and now https://pad.okfn.org is officially retired in read-only mode. All pads should be accessible via their old URLs, so no links have been broken. If you want to download your pads, you can extract the raw markdown by adding .txt to the end of the URL. In other words, if your pad is https://pad.okfn.org/p/my_pad, you can access it in Markdown via https://pad.okfn.org/p/my_pad.txt.

All the best,
Vitor.

#8

It was a very good public service of OKI. Is there a way to revert it?

#9

Hi Vitor,
unfortunately, we have organized our e-mail newsletter through your pad. We’ve lost a lot of content that we’ve incorporated this week. When did you convert to .txt.? Is there a way to get the very last state of the pad?

Greetings
Erik

#10

@Erik_Reinholz Sorry to hear that, we will re-run the extractor to get the latest content. Meanwhile, you can temporarily access the pad via http://oki-pad.herokuapp.com/.

#11

Unfortunately not. We’ve been streamlining the number of services we maintain, and as there are now many alternatives to our pad, we decided to retire it. Many of us at OKI are now using https://hackmd.io/, you might find it useful as well.