Is it only me or has meteorpad.com been down for a while now? After listening to a pod cast by @sashko and @benstr with @gschmidt as guest in which he talked about the sci-fi version of the future; I can’t stop but think about MeteorPad becoming that all-in-one-hosted-wysiswyg development tool of the future.
It’s been dead since at least February.
Hi all,
please checkout my appeal and note to Michael Risse at the meteorpad issue queue
Hi @benstr @gschmidt @sashko, it is really a worst case scenario that so much knowledge is blown away just in case of one personal decision. I feel very bad in believing a recommend tool (see official blog by @danahmadi) and now be not supported anymore. Hopefully you will also try to ask Michael at least to push the sources somewhere.
Thanks
Tom
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This seems a bit unfair to Mike. Meteorpad was his project, so he gets to decide if he wants to take it down, and he doesn’t owe us the source code or anything else: it was a free thing he made, on the side. The blog post is 18 months old (and was written by Alice, not Dan). Trying to defer to authority (not real authorities, since they have no influence over Mike’s personal projects) to get something to happen feels disrespectful to Mike’s original effort and continued work for the past years keeping it running.
Instead of being upset that Meteorpad is gone, maybe we should start a new project? One that’s open source from the start and built by multiple contributors? Then we can avoid a situation like this arising again in the future.
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In principle, you’re right. But: taking down such a valuable resource is causing some real problems. I just stumbled upon a very interesting post on these forums today, but it was completely useless since it pointed to vanished meteorpads.
It’s ok to take something down, if you’re not interested in maintaining it anymore. But doing this without any migration path is not really nice. BTW: the same applies to meteor.com which used to be an invaluable resource for package demos, which are now gone. This was the second letdown I was facing today - multiple times.
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Can you name any beyond “it was a little inconvenient to me that a link I found didn’t work”? Finding links that don’t work happens all the time on the internet. I don’t think we need to make it bigger than it is.
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Of course it’s just the same as if a link has been broken. But, as far as I understand it, meteorpad was meant to provide a valuable source for meteor dev related code samples, just like CodePen or similar services. For this to work, reliability is key. Nobody can force the maintainer to continue the project. But just taking it down and losing all that valuable information is at least not nice to the community. Especially, if even the complete source code has been removed from the repository, which does not allow anybody to setup an alternative service. On a formal level, that’s pretty ok. But on a gut-feeling level, it’s not nice at all.
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The source code was never available; Meteorpad has never been open source.
I’m sorry, but you’re coming off as really entitled. People who make free software for use by the community don’t owe anyone anything. Mike made something and gave it away for free for years. Rather than complaining about it, I think it would be far more constructive and respectful to see what the next step is in offering a similar service.
We have another thread on the forums thanking MDG employees who’ve moved on for their time spent working on Meteor. I would much rather thank Mike for even doing anything in the first place than turn it around like this. This way no one will want to make anything again, because they’ll just anticipate this kind of response if they ever change their minds.
So, thank you, @mike! Good work and hope you keep making awesome stuff 
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If he isn’t willing to hand over the source, a mongodump of the public data would go a long way as well (even if just to create a read-only archive of the code).
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Hi Rahul ( @rahul )
not sure if you have read my issue post on meteorpad queue, but I absolutely respect @mike s personal choice. The only part I am asking for and I guess that should be naturally and would be more than fair enough :: just to get a mongodump or whatever from the public sources.
So as @waldgeist already mentioned, there are a lot of answers (even some of my owns) on stack exchange and here in forum, reflecting to sample codes on meteorpad.
No one will direct Mike to continue work even not for free, but as long as he had promised the service I feel it is a good style to give people back what they have brought in.
Sure you agree on that request, don’t you?
Cheers
Tom
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Meteorpad was pretty rad, especially when I was on non-traditional devices ( an iPad, a Raspberry Pi… ) So I want to join in on saying thanks for all the years that Meteorpad operated. It was very handy and clever.
Now, was it “not nice”? Well, for a lot of web sites that get a little bit internet famous, there is a pattern. You might even say that there’s site-take-down etiquette. It would look something like this list, from the most common steps to the least common steps:
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Put up a page that says that the site was taken down. The most obvious step to take because up until I found this thread what I did for a few weeks was try it, wait ~5 minutes for the server to time out, and then try again in a few hours/days. I did not know what was going on. It’s not obvious that the site is permanently down. Sites go down temporarily all the time.
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Shameless self-promotion. The most common prose on a take-down page is fluff that reminds everyone who made that site, how much work it was, etc, with a links to everybody’s linkedin. Or even just something for anyone wondering… “What’s @mike up to instead then?”
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Offer an alternative solution. which I think would be to just bite the bullet and install Meteor normally on a “real” computer.
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Offer a way to get in touch to download one’s personal projects. Not everyone had ten dozen todo example apps. I had a handfull of really great projects I tinkered on from time to time on Meteorpad, foolishly not stored anywhere else. RIP.
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Point to a roundtable Occasionally, the ex-admins will give a link to a facebook page, or a forum (like this one), or a hashtag where people can reminisce about all the good times and what fun they had. Boy howdy, what fun #Meteorpad used to be.
Can an object’s creator destroy their creation at their whimsy? Absolutely! And if it is well-liked, should they do so without leaving a trace? I don’t personally recommend it.
But it is not common in cases like this for creators to just give their creations away. More commonly, someone else will try to copy it.
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I like to put one object to the post from @wray:
Bad drop down experiences of free projects like that (especially missing 1. and 4.) will keep users away from using next upcoming ideas from innovators who are willing to handle everything in the common way (1. - 5.)
And for that I can’t understand that MDG is not interested to support the developers at least to get back the public project sources they have entered and also save that overall meteor knowledge. But maybe they do and dont’t get response from @mike as well? I don’t know.
Looking forward to some response from Mike …
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I won’t give up to get some feedback from @mike
Just left a comment on the github issue
Wondering whats happen on him.
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Good to see some of the respected members of our community are just as concerned about the disappearance of MeteorPad as I am.
The REAL REASON I started this discussion was to put the spotlight on MeteorPad or even MadEye as, possibly, the next best project MDG can invest in. After reading the RoadMap, I do feel that this can come after Apollo!
First of all, I’m sorry for being silent on this thread and the similar GitHub issues. I’ve had a lot going on in my life the past few months, but I should have made the time to at least say something. Hope this is better late than never.
First let me give some background on how MeteorPad came into being. A couple years ago now, MDG contracted me to build MeteorPad. After it was built, they continued to pay for the significant hosting cost until early this year. Once that happened I wasn’t able to personally afford the hosting costs so I pulled the cord on the service. I want to emphasize here that I’m not upset with MDG for their decision. They’re a business and the hosting costs for the service were non-trivial. I’m incredibly grateful I had the opportunity to get paid to work on a project as cool as MeteorPad.
Like a lot of you I’m sad to see MeteorPad go away. I’ll have some free time (but not a lot) over the next few months and would happily work with people to keep some version of MeteorPad alive.
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Option A is to modify MeteorPad to simply not run a server process per pad. This would dramatically reduce hosting costs. Unfortunately it also makes MeteorPad little more than gist for meteor. It would “unbreak” all the broken links to MeteorPad on the forums and stackOverflow.
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Option B would be to open source MeteorPad (I currently own the source) and allow users to run their own MeteorPad servers.
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Option C would be to try to raise enough monthly recurring revenue to cover hosting. I’d still want to open source MeteorPad under this scenario so I could have some help from the community with maintenance.
I’d be really interested to hear what everyone here thinks. In particular:
- Are you willing and able to contribute to MeteorPad (technologies include Meteor, Docker, Ansible)
- If I followed through with option B would you be interested in hosting your own MeteorPad server?
- For Option C, would you will be willing to personally contribute money to keep MeteorPad running? I’d definitely be open to corporate sponsorship in this scenario.
Hope we can make something work!
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I am always happy to contribute to stuff like this!
Just so the community knows what it is asking for, rough order of magnitude how much are we talking per month? $500 … $5,000 per month?
I know MDG said the free Meteor hosting was around $10K per week… I suspect MeteorPad wouldn’t be that extreme.
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Thanks, @mike.
- for being really transparent about this
- for building such an awesome service
I really, really like(d) Meteorpad and I’m excited to hear that it could live again!
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