I strongly agree with Antoine. Furthermore, this should be announced far more widely than the tech-oriented mailing lists, and with longer notice.
On Tue, 10 Feb 2026, 15:27 Antoine Musso via Wikitech-l, <[email protected]> wrote: > > Le 10/02/2026 à 13:56, Jelto Wodstrcil via Ops a écrit : > > Hello everyone > > If you don't use etherpad, you can ignore this message. > > We will delete all pads after 1st March 2026! If you need any of your pads, > please make a local backup. We will not be able to recover the data after 1st > March. > > The pad cleanup helps to reduce the size of the database and the footprint on > our infrastructure. After the cleanup, etherpad can still be used for > real-time collaboration but please do not expect long term storage. > Additional cleanups might happen after that unannounced. > > See also https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T415237 for more information. > > Greetings and thank you > > Jelto > > Hi, > > It seems we never purged EtherPad? > > My former team (platform engineering) took notes there and since we were > aware EtherPad was not a permanent store we copy/pasted the text to > mediawiki.org. > > Then not everyone was aware of the ephemeral state of EtherPad. In the early > days it has been used for note keeping during various events and meetings. > https://www.mediawiki.org/ shows plenty of articles pointing to EtherPad > which would indicate their content were not transferred toward permanent > storage. Or maybe they were and the left over pad got changed with a link to > the wiki page. > > I understand there has been no promise to keep the pads permanently, then I > am not sure people were necessarily aware. I also understand the challenge > of having to support for a huge database table and it is very legitimate to > get rid of it. > > However, I am concerned about the lost of history which might be valuable for > history of the movement. Would it be possible to generate a static dump of > those pads similar to what we did when phasing Extension:CodeReview? Though > there might be privacy concerns since some pads were not necessarily intended > to be public :-\ Or maybe I am just a data h _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
