Shutting down TitanPad

Hi.

Christian Hofstädtler, Michael Prokop and I launched TitanPad.com more than 6 years ago. The idea for the project stemmed from the need to provide users of EtherPad.com, ourselves included, a safe haven to move to after the rather abrupt shutdown notice given after AppJet's acquisition by Google.

We believed in the idea of real-time & hassle-free collaborative text editing and wanted to give access to this new way of working on content collaboratively.

In the years following the shutdown of the original EtherPad.com we hoped that a community would form around the EtherPad codebase which would allow us to foster & grow the service in the coming future. However, while there was a rewrite of the service in node.js, it was lacking the maturity and features of the "legacy" EtherPad codebase.The availability of etherpad-lite also meant that the now dubbed "legacy" Etherpad.com codebase was doomed to obscurity.

Six years later, the situation, from an FOSS-perspective, is unchanged. etherpad-lite still lacks features and etherpad-legacy remains unmaintained. The risk that an unmaintained application poses is non-negligeable and compounded by the success of Titanpad.com. Over the years, we invested considerable amounts of time and money to keep the site running and support its users.

Although the resources needed to keep the site running could be covered by crowd-funding, the unmaintained application code is not something that can be easily fixed. Without steady development & improvement the project is unsustainable. The underlying technologies of the Web are in constant evolution and we cannot keep TitanPad up to Web standards.

To prevent getting left out in the rain by an incompatible browser update in the future, we therefore decided to do a graceful shutdown of the project and give all of you a chance to migrate your data, teams and workflows to other services.

We can't give recommendations on which service to move to since the needs of all of you differ hugely. For some, the data privacy aspect was the most important one. For others, the ability to create private subdomains.

Here are two sites which have compiled lists of alternatives to TitanPad.com:

• similarsitesearch.com
• moreofit.com

Our schedule for the shutdown is as follows

• 1st May 2017: All pads will be made read-only, no new pads can be created.
• 31st Dec 2017: Titanpad.com will shut down.

Best wishes from all of us, and thanks for all the pads!

Encryption now enabled by default

TitanPad is now using TLS (or SSL, as it was called in the past) for all connections - this means that all communication between you and TitanPad will be encrypted, ensuring that all communication and pad contents can't be seen by adversaries which may have access to your communication lines.

To make sure that people won't be able to strip the encryption we will enable Strict Transport Security in the next few weeks after we're confident that we don't have any show-stopper bugs anymore.

It might be necessary for you to restart your browser and/or clear your cache if you encounter problems. If you should run into any other issues with your clients please report the Browser and Operating system on our support page and we'll try to get it fixed.

Deletion policy of private pads

Following up on the last post we need to extend the deletion policy to private subdomains.

Starting with today we're going to delete all private subdomains which haven't been accessed for more than two years.

To prevent this from happening to your subdomain logging in once every year is more than enough to prevent your subdomain from expiring.

Deletion policy of public pads

The constant growth of TitanPad made it necessary that we think about data persistence. While I'm writing this blog post there are close to 90.000 public pads and over 45.000 pads in private subdomains. In total they take up about 100 GiB of disk space.

To slow down the growth of the disk usage we're going to delete public pads which haven't been used for a long time.

Starting with April 22nd 2012 we're going to delete all public pads which haven't been accessed in the last 12 months.

Since most of the public pads are very transient in nature we don't expect to hit major problems with this approach - if you've still got important data in public pads now might be a good time to move them into your own private subdomain!

Data loss of public pads

On Feb 2 2012 around 17:30 UTC an incident caused the complete loss of about 5200 public pads (http://titanpad.com/<padname> URL). Of those 5200 pads about 870 were accessed in the last 9 days.

The data loss was introduced while trying to resynchronize an outdated database slave server which was used for backup purposes.

UPDATE:

A backup with the state as of Jan 30 2012 00:17 UTC exists and is available at http://devpad.amd.co.at/.

This address will be reachable until Feb 14 2012 00:00, please copy the content of the pads you lost over to http://titanpad.com/, if necessary under a new name. The broken Pads on titanpad.com will be removed eventually.

Unfortunately it's not possible to recover the changes between Jan 30 and Feb 2 for the broken/lost pads, we're very sorry about this.

Offering a stable and reliable hosted EtherPad site was the main reason why we started TitanPad in the first place and compromising our vision like this doesn't sit lightly with us. We'll improve our monitoring, backup processes and operations documentation to prevent fiascos like this in the future.

Subdomains / private spaces are now live

We've just enabled the subdomains / private spaces feature, which let's you create a subdomain on titanpad.com, where only you and your team can edit pads. Signup here.

Please consider it beta quality for the moment. Also, we're using CAcert for SSL - therefore to be able to use this feature, you need to install the CAcert Root Certificates (else, you'll get scary warnings).

EtherPad.com gone – long live TitanPad.com!

By today (14th of April 2010) new pad creation will be disabled at EtherPad.com. We at TitanPad are here to fill this gap - to quote our TOS / Privacy Info:

TitanPad was launched to provide an EtherPad setup which is unrelated to any commercial and political entities. Its goal is to offer a stable service through proper operating.
[...]

TitanPad is based on the open-source release of EtherPad, after they were acquired by Google. If you're used to EtherPad already - you'll feel like at home with TitanPad, it works exactly the same.

Now TitanPad is officially up and running and you’re free to use it for online collaboration. Feel free to drop your feedback, questions and suggestions to our team via mail to support (at) titanpad.com.