Fall cleaning: shutting down some of my projects

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Mattias Geniar, October 31, 2017

Follow me on Twitter as @mattiasgeniar

Just a quick heads-up, I’m taking several of my projects offline as they prove to be too much of a hassle.

Mailing List Archive

Almost 2 years ago, I started a project to mirror/archive public mailing lists in a readable, clean layout. It’s been fun, but quite a burden to maintain. In particular;

  • The mailing list archive now consists of ~3.500.000 files, which meant special precautions with filesystems (running out of inodes) & other practical concerns related to backups.

  • Abuse & take-down reports: lots of folks mailed a public mailing list, apparently not realizing it would be – you know – public. So they ask their name & email to be removed from those that mirror it. Like me. Or, in one spectacular case, a take down request by Italian police because of some drug-related incident on the Jenkins public mailing list. Fun stuff. It involved threatening lawyer mails that I quickly complied with.

All of that combined, it isn’t worth it. It got around 1.000 daily pageviews, mostly from the Swift mailing list community. Sorry folks, it’s gone now.

This also means the death of the @foss_security & @oss_announce Twitter accounts, since those were built on top of the mailing list archive.

Manpages Archive

I ran a manpages archive on man.ttias.be, but nobody used it (or knew about it), so I deleted it. Also hard to keep up to date, with different versions of packages & different manpages etc.

Also, it’s surprisingly hard to download all manpages, extract them, turn them into HTML & throw them on a webserver. Who knew?!

Coinjump

This was a wild idea where I tried to crowdsource the meaning behind cryptocurrency price jumps. A coin can increase in value at a rate of 400% of more in just a few hours, the idea was to find the reason behind it and learn from it.

It also fueled the @CoinJumpApp account on Twitter, but that’s dead now too.

The source is up on Github, but I’m no longer maintaining it.

More time for other stuff!

Either way, some projects just cause me more concern & effort than I care to put into them, so time to clean that up & get some more mental braincycles for different projects!

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