Is Hackpad unmaintained?

[konklone]

There's been almost no activity in months:

https://github.com/dropbox/hackpad/graphs/contributors

Is Hackpad the product unmaintained post-acquisition, or is a different codebase used in production?

[pmig]

👍

[grexe]

I'm afraid they are all too busy with Paper and Hackpad is left in open source nirvana for PR reasons...:(

[feoh]

This isn't heartening. Sending email to hackpad support yields this:

Hi Chris,

Thanks for reaching out with this question about Hackpad!

Please refer to our Hackpad FAQ, and if that doesn't address your concern, please refer to the How to Use Hackpad tutorial.

If your question remains unanswered after reading those, we recommend you reach out to the Hackpad open-source community, available on https://github.com/dropbox/hackpad, where you can work with the community to find resolution.

Kindly,
Your friends at Hackpad

Hackpad Support
support@hackpad.com

[X41]

yeah you get that answer for every support mail you write. got the same answer when i asked about the export being broken on hackpad.com because i'm trying to move all our old pads over, but they don't have the balls to outright say "sorry we don't give a fuck anymore lol" (can't really blame 'em when i look at some of the problems the code has)

[feoh]

The good news is that it's basically Markdown, so you can simply copy&paste your content out. If anyone has found an amazing alternative to Hackpad for collaborative markdown editing, do tell!
(Other than running your own Etherpad instance. un-fun.)

[gitdebs]

@feoh I got the same damn email. I get so pissed when this happens - I keep annoying the dropbox folks on twitter hoping they will eventually respond but effort in futility - mine is over 100 pages and such a waste of time to copy and paste etc.

Note: I did try the dropbox sync - and even that does not really work - only syncs a fraction of the site.

[grexe]

we switched to using the built-in Wiki in GitLab - not live collaborative
editing, but well done preview, inherent versioning with Git;) and
MarkDown... shame about Hackpad though.

On Tue, 2 Feb 2016 at 00:49 gitdebs notifications@github.com wrote:

Feoh I got the same damn email. I get so pissed when this happens - I keep
annoying the dropbox folks on twitter hoping they will eventually respond
but effort in futility - mine is over 100 pages and such a waste of time to
copy and paste etc.

Note: I did try the dropbox sync - and even that does not really work -
only syncs a fraction of the site.

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#51 (comment).

[feoh]

The collaborative bit is key for us. I co-host a podcast, and we use Hackpad for the show notes and interview questions, sometimes we interact with each other in the doc during the show "Did he already answer this one?" etc.

[X41]

you might want to consider swtiching to a normal etherpad then if hackpad is giving you too much trouble

[donundeen]

How are people handling this transition? Any recommendations for alternatives?
I just wrote some code to export all my hackapds in to MD and HTML, since I'm not confident in HP doing it for me. Will share that shortly.
that said, are people thinking about hosting HP elsewhere, taking over maintenance, etc? or are you all just moving to something else?

HP really hit my sweet spot, and I'm not excited about moving into dropbox world.

cheers.

[jedahan]

So hackpad was a fork of etherpad, which another version is still actively developed https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite . Etherpad supports plugins, and there are a few that would be useful for approximating hackpad's features : inline media previews, comments, and some even better features like markdown preview. There is an official plugin list, and if you want to just get up-and-running quickly, sandstorm.io is a pretty neat option for testing it out.

Still, the etherpad design could use a bit of work, and I'm not sure how namespacing works.

Paper is pretty slick, but i'm not sure how data import/export works, etc. It seems very...project management-y which could be a bug or feature.

[feoh]

I'll check out sandstorm.io.

Running your own etherpad-lite is not a trivial undertaking. It comes with
zero admin interface, the plugins are in various states of disrepair, and
the thing is an ungainly node app with a bazillion dependencies that tells
you to hand build the latest node.js to run it - not a trivial thing if
you're on a VPS or something.

And it requires a backing database for 'production' use. All told a real
heavy hitter if all you want to do is collaborate on some markdown.

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 11:08 AM, Jonathan Dahan notifications@github.com
wrote:

So hackpad was a fork of etherpad, which another version is still actively
developed https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite . Etherpad supports
plugins, and there are a few that would be useful for approximating
hackpad's features : inline media previews
https://github.com/JohnMcLear/ep_embedmedia, comments
https://www.npmjs.com/package/ep_comments_page, and some even better
features like markdown preview https://github.com/JohnMcLear/ep_markdown.
There is an official plugin list http://static.etherpad.org/plugins.html,
and if you want to just get up-and-running quickly, sandstorm.io is a
pretty neat option for testing it out.

Still, the etherpad design could use a bit of work, and I'm not sure how
namespacing works.

Paper is pretty slick, but i'm not sure how data import/export works, etc.
It seems very...project management-y which could be a bug or feature.

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#51 (comment).

Christopher Patti - Geek At Large | GTalk: cpatti@gmail.com | AIM:
chrisfeohpatti | P: (260) 54PATTI
"Technology challenges art, art inspires technology." - John Lasseter, Pixar

[jedahan]

Another alternative, which lacks a major feature (realtime collaborative) but is 10000x easier to setup is tiddlywiki. Its a single page application that is all client-side. When you are done editing, you just save the page for a new version...

Still, nothing close to a hosted solution.

Of course, someone could just setup a sandstorm instance and ask users to help pay the server bills...

It would be a really cool project to incorporate a P2P version of etherpad's algorithm, so no server was needed...

[jedahan]

@feoh have you tried installing and running etherpad-lite recently?

I was looking at removing some of the pain points you were mentioning, but I really don't see them.

git clone https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite.git
cd etherpad-lite
make
./bin/run.sh
open http://0.0.0.0:9001/

The minimum supported version of nodejs is v0.10.0, which was released on March 2013, almost 3 years ago. If your server or vps does not package an almost 3 year old release of node, then I think that's more an issue with the distribution than the hackpad application code.

As far as setting up a db, it supports 4 kinds, so if you are not ok with sqlite or on-disk (dirty), then yeah, postgresql and mysql can be a pain to setup. But if the piece of software is so crucial that you need mysql or postgresql, I can't figure out how to improve that out-of-box experience without just like, making packages for individual distros/vps's, or maybe a docker image. Which is what I think sandstorm is trying to do (though I haven't used them much).

It would be cool though, if you had an idea on how to make hosting it trivial for the general case...

[almereyda]

This discussion very much resembles the long time of no answers in hackpad/hackpad#1

In the end we can argue Dropbox acquired Hackpad to let it die?

[jedahan]

@almereyda I do not think Dropbox acquired Hackpad because they wanted hackpad to die, but because they wanted to acquire and sell hackpad as part of their platform. The immediate consequence is what you see here - a project abandoned by its creators because all of them got hired.

It's sad to see when an open source project goes closed source, but its nice to see people who worked hard on it getting hired for their work.

I say we just treat the code as it is - something ripe for contributors, open for a project lead, and readily forkable. It's a shame that none of the main contributors care enough to chime in, but understandable as maybe nothing they could say would be helpful to the hackpad project.

[almereyda]

Dear Jonathan, I very much thank you for thoughtful words and agree with
them in all terms.

On 2 March 2016 at 18:18, Jonathan Dahan notifications@github.com wrote:

@almereyda https://github.com/almereyda I do not think Dropbox acquired
Hackpad because they wanted hackpad to die, but because they wanted to
acquire and sell hackpad as part of their platform. The immediate
consequence is what you see here - a project abandoned by its creators
because all of them got hired.

It's sad to see when an open source project goes closed source, but its
nice to see people who worked hard on it getting hired for their work.

I say we just treat the code as it is - something ripe for contributors,
open for a project lead, and readily forkable. It's a shame that none of
the main contributors care enough to chime in, but understandable as maybe
nothing they could say would be helpful to the hackpad project.

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#51 (comment).

[bjoernm]

In case you are looking for an alternative to the now unmaintained hackpad you can try Nuclino. It's more of a wiki-style software, but also supports real-time collaborative editing and markdown commands like hackpad.

[jimmybrancaccio]

Seems neat, but can't self-host it? Boo 👎

[ELLIOTTCABLE]

Ugh, and now the app's disappeared from the iOS store. That's some bullshit. )'=

http://ell.io/i16R5O

[saintsal]

I've started using the Documents app in ownCloud. Support collaborative editing.

[pierreozoux]

@bjoernm Nuclino is not Open source or is it?

I saw many forks on Hackpad, maybe, one cool idea would be to say it out loud, this is 'librepad' the official fork from hackpad?

[bjoernm]

@pierreozoux no, it's closed source and hosted, but we actually have a free tier if you are interested.

[markmark1]

how do i try the free tier?

[markmark1]

I'm interested how do i get the closed source

On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 6:31 AM, Björn Michelsen notifications@github.com
wrote:

@pierreozoux https://github.com/pierreozoux no, it's closed source and
hosted, but we actually have a free tier if you are interested.

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[markmark1]

free tier

On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 6:31 AM, Björn Michelsen notifications@github.com
wrote:

@pierreozoux https://github.com/pierreozoux no, it's closed source and
hosted, but we actually have a free tier if you are interested.

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[X41]

hackmd looks like a great alternative that i'm gonna be using from now on

[pierro78]

I like the fact that you can have a subdomain with hackpad like mysubdomain.hackpad.com, this allows you to navigate "quite easily" in a group of pages.
I also like the comments in dropbox paper but it looks like it's not so easy to navigate in a group of dropbox papers pages, right ?

Does anybody know if there's like a service which allows to easily host subdomain names like mysubdomain.unknownservice.com , the web site http://mysubdomain.unknownservice.com would have a tab bar with dropbox paper pages at the top with names like "home", "page1", ..., "pageN" , and when you click on a tab like "home" then an iframe with the "home" dropbox paper page appears below the tab ??

(with netvibes you can almost do that except you don't have a subdomain and, if you have navigated inside a tab, you need to refresh the whole netvibes page to go back to the "original" content of the tab)

PS :
I wanted to illustrate what I meant using netvibes : http://www.netvibes.com/wikitest#Home but dropbox paper doesn t support being embedded ... hackpad is OK though : http://www.netvibes.com/villesentransition#a_propos

[almereyda]

Hackpad is shutting down by July 19.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14196708