Re: [Ops] Etherpad cleanup, save your pads now!

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
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