etherpad-termination-notice

This is a read only archive of pad.okfn.org. See the shutdown announcement for details.

etherpad-termination-notice === TERMINATION NOTICE ===

OKF's ETHERPAD SERVICE "okfnpad.org" WILL BE TERMINATED ON October 15th 2013.
ALL 'TEAM PADS' *.okfnpad.org WILL BE TERMINATED AS WELL, with the exception of "new.okfnpad.org", which will be available as okfnpad.org post termination of the old service.

PLEASE MIGRATE ALL YOUR CONTENT OUT OF okfnpad.org AND OUT OF THE TEAM PADS *.okfnpad.org BEFORE October 15th!

We have bootstrapped a new Etherpad service at http://new.okfnpad.org/ . For a number of reasons (see below), the OKF core team will
NOT migrate any content from the old Etherpad service to new.okfnpad.org. But you can copy pads yourself to new.okfnpad.org.
Note that new.okfnpad.org has no user authentcation or password protection. All pads are always public.

Regards,
Your OKF sysadmin team (see http://wiki.okfn.org/Sysadmin for contact details)

== FAQ ==

Q: I am still using (*.)okfnpad.org. What shall i do?
A: You have a number of options:

If your are fine with all your pads being public and anyone being able to edit them, then you can copy your pads to new.okfnpad.org. You might want to apply a URL scheme like http://myteam.okfnpad.org/PadName ==> http://new.okfnpad.org/MyTeam-PadName
There is a fair number of public Etherpad service. There probably is one that suits you: https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite/wiki/Sites-that-run-Etherpad-Lite
Google Docs is an obvious option for authenticated collaborative text editing.
Give your weight to implement team support in Etherpad-lite: https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite/wiki/TODO#wiki-authentication_authorisation_security_user_adminstration_multiuser_issues (Commons Machinery can offer $1,000 if this is done, maybe others can join in to get it done?)

Q: Why is OKF terminating okfnpad.org and the team pads?
A: The Etherpad service that OKF is running on *.okfnpad.org is based on the original, Scala-based version of the Open-Source software "EtherPad", also called "Etherpad-full".
Unfortunately, Etherpad-full development has been discontinued a while ago. The Etherpad foundation is strongly encouraging all Etherpad operators to migrate to the new, node.js-based Etherpad-lite.
Since Etherpad-lite lacks two features that okfnpad.org was heavily relying on (team pads with authentication, and password-protected pads), OKF was reluctant to follow that path. But by now a number of serious security issues have been discovered for which no patch is available.
This leaves us no choice but to terminate the old Etherpad-full installation, unfortunately we did not find any other solution/software/service that provides functionality similar to EtherPad team pads and is not completely alpha. If you know one, please let us know.

Q: Why is OKF not migrating the content of (*.)okfnpad.org to new.okfnpad.org?
A: For a number of reasons:

Etherpad-lite does not support team pads. It is not obvious how one would migrate dozends of team pads into one pad (name space collisions!)
The existing migration scripts import the full typing history of each pad. The typing history accumulated in okfnpad is vast. Migrating it would be waste of resources, and (we tested it) it would overwelm Etherpad-lite and render it unusably slow.
The existing migration scripts fail on our vast etherpad database. In particular they struggle with similar pad names.
Team pads require user authentication by default, but Etherpad lite does not support authentication. We do not want to accidentally publish sensitive content.
90% of all pads are obsolete anyway. A good opportunity to tidy up.

Q: If I now share links to the new.okfnpad.org, will they stay functional when the new service is moved to okfnpad.org?
A: Yes we will keep new.okfnpad.org URLs functional, either as aliases or as redirects. E.g. http://new.okfnpad.org/p/roadshow-ideas will be automatically redirect to http://okfnpad.org/p/roadshow-ideas after October 15th.

Q: How are the backups managed in the new pad? In the team pad we used to take regularly backups from all pads with the download-all funktion.
A: Since there is no concept of teams or accounts in etherpad-lite, you will need to keep track of all your pads and download them manually at some point. (as a suggestion, use a prefix that identifies pads that belong to you/team)