Hi,

Speaking on behalf of the SRE team that owns Etherpad I wanted to chime in here.

The arguments for extending the deadline and broader communication are reasonable.
- We can extend the deadline to April 30th, if there are still migration projects in progress at that point then we can revisit the date on a case by case basis.
- I will follow up internally to identify the right groups to notify, if you have suggestions please send them directly to me (I already saw a proposed posting on a Village Pump in the related Phabricator task).

I also agree that any planned future clean up should be communicated in advance.

As for backing up information, after identifying the pads they can be exported in txt or html using appropriate public endpoints:
- http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/<pad_title>/export/txt
- http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/<pad_title>/export/html

On Wed, Feb 11, 2026 at 10:57 AM Strainu via Wikitech-l <wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hello Jetlo,

I want to support the idea expressed by my fellow volunteers that this decision does not adequately support the community's use-cases. I fully understand that Etherpad was designed as a temporary collaboration tool, but:
* it is not only used by the tech community, so such an announcement must go out as widely as possible, especially on the lists dedicated to conference organizers  and wikimedia-l
* 17 days is not enough heads up for the community to organize and sort/backup decades of meeting minutes. I believe that for the first cleanup, 3 months would a more realistic timeline
* future purges should also have a predictable schedule and be announced at least a month in advance, to allow people to save their work

I hope your team will reconsider their decision to cater for the needs of the wider community.

Best,
  Strainu

În mar., 10 feb. 2026 la 14:57, Jelto Wodstrcil via Wikitech-l <wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org> a scris:
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

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Lukasz