Etherpad transition to Etherpad Lite

Dear Mozillians,

The Mozilla IT Security, Compliance and Security Council teams have carefully evaluated and determined that Etherpad (etherpad-mozilla.org, formerly etherpad.mozilla.org) must be retired. The lack of development or patches (the product hasn’t had either since 2013), leaves anyone who uses it vulnerable to bugs that cannot be fixed.

We know that many of you use Etherpad for everyday collaboration. That is why we have deployed a new instance of Etherpad Lite. Etherpad Lite does not have team pads. It also does not have password protected pads. Etherpad Lite can only be used for public collaboration.

Transition to Etherpad Lite
Public access to Etherpad (etherpad-mozilla.org) has been removed, effective immediately. A new Etherpad Lite instance has been made available at https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org.

Etherpad Lite has been pre-populated with public pads from some teams that the Participation Team was able to identify and contact administrators for:
remo, participation, mozhispano, partinfra, cbt, koolkids

These can be accessed at “http://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/teamname-oldpadname”.

For example https://remo.etherpad.mozilla.org/call-20-08-15 becomes https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/remo-call-20-08-15

Many of the pads are named slightly differently. Instead of the “-” after the teamname, it should be “.” … if a pad doesn’t work, please try this different naming convention.

Update 10/7 7:22pm UTC: We now have a process for retrieving team pads. Please use this form:
http://goo.gl/forms/0qD9tkRlBU

Update 10/8 5:18am UTC – You can see a complete updated list of all migrated pads here:
https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/etherpad-transition-to-etherpad-lite/4529/25

Old Etherpads
1) All public non-team pads are available to all Mozillians at https://old.etherpad-mozilla.org/. For example “https://etherpad-mozilla.org/lunch” is available at https://old.etherpad-mozilla.org/lunch.

  1. The old Etherpad will be accessible through VPN access only (mainly employee accessible), and should be treated as read-only beyond this point at https://old-etherpad.webapp.phx1.mozilla.com/ (for public non-team pads) and https://team.old-etherpad.webapp.phx1.mozilla.com/ (for private or public team pads).
    These pads will be available for a limited timeframe, while content is retrieved for those who need it.

3) Team pads (public or private) - For those team pads not listed above, employees and contributors with Mozilla VPN access can retrieve your important and necessary Etherpad data through https://team.old-etherpad.webapp.phx1.mozilla.com/ and copy it to an alternative collaboration tools. If you do not have Mozilla VPN access, we suggest you get in touch with your closest employee contact who can find someone with appropriate access and who can create a copy of your team’s Etherpad data to an appropriate alternative collaboration solution.

If you cannot find someone who has VPN access to help you, you may submit a moco-confidential bug in Bugzilla under Product: Infrastructure & Operations, and Component: Etherpad Migration using this link below.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?component=Etherpad Migration&groups=mozilla-employee-confidential&product=Infrastructure %26 Operations

If you have any questions, please send an email to EtherpadTransition@mozilla.com

Thanks,
George Roter, Head of Core Contributors, Participation
– sent on behalf of Sylvie Veilleux, VP of Information Technology

4 Likes

Ouch. This hurts. Figures it had to happen someday though. :confused:

Is there any way all the broken links can be redirected to instructions on how to recover old team pads?

1 Like

Could we find out if it’s possible to whitelist MozillaWiki so that wiki pages can be created from etherpads that were previously publicly accessible? There is a lot of content referenced from MozillaWiki that is hosted in etherpads that are now unavailable.

1 Like

Kinda in the same line as @ckoehler. If not possible to whitelist, it’d be great if a domain redirection is set up for those links. I just remembered the wiki I was editing just two days back had etherpad links as a dumping place to all previous discussion pertaining to that project

Working on this. Great suggestion.

We’re working on domain redirection.

Whitelisting definitely isn’t possible.

If you’re interested in writing a bot or script to help import etherpad content to MozillaWiki, please get in touch. I started working on this earlier in the year and am happy to give guidance.

That would be a really really long manual transition process for local teams… :cry:

Where can we translate the UI of the new pad?

The old one only support english - that’s fine,
but new one fallback to some existing languages,
eg. zh-cn for us who use zh-tw, which is not really good.

I have an etherpad group with several etherpad. How can I get the content.

Sorry for that question, but I´m not so firm in using etherpad:

I have an etherpad named: https://etherpad-mozilla.org/zwSV

When I open this, it is automatically forwarded to https://old.etherpad-mozilla.org/zwSV
btu the content is an old one of yesterday morning.

We worked on that at aprox. 13.00 EMT and this Version is not there.

What can I do?

Moving to mozillians to get more people notified.

That’s cool :slight_smile:

@AllanSmithee The archive took hours to make and was obviously done before you had made changes.

I think that content is only accessible through a bit of a process. How important is it to you? And how urgent?

Wouldn’t it be possible for converting all public+team pads to public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/team-padname automatically and set a redirect from the old link?

@asdofindia Right now that can’t be done unless we have admin access to the team in order to get the list of all URLs (among other requirements).

Good Question:-)
We used the etherpad for protocolling a meeting. So I would say quite important and urgend.

Thanks for your quick answer. I would appeciate, if you can tell me, what is possible to recover and in wich periode of time.

Hello George,
I am a volunteer from Mozilla Bangladesh community. Mostly I contribute on SuMo l10, forum and advocacy. The thing is all of our past event and meeting records, future events planning was written in Etherpad. Even we have two event on Friday and Saturday. All the session planning was there and that pad was so important for us. Now I can’t recover it through the method you describe.
Closing etherpad for bugs is a good decision but it’s really really very bad decision doing it without our acknowledgment. I think there are so many Mozillians who find this odd. Because that was our data and it’s gone without our confirmation. You people are just saying it now that, “It must be retired”. That means you were planning to close it, so you may give us a notice to shift our data before closing. In a open and broad community closing a key communication tool without any confirmation, it is really poor decision. Even I have tried so many preferences tweak after seeing the “Secure Connection Failed” error on etherpad’s website. And I think many other Mozillian will do the same thing. So I am really frustrated about this decision.

3 Likes

Thanks for the feedback on the impact that this is having. I will pass it
along to those in Mozilla IT.

We’ve created a process now for getting the info required to recover team
pads. We can’t commit to a timeline on this yet but please fill out the Doc
and we’ll keep you updated:

http://goo.gl/forms/0qD9tkRlBU

Thank you for your quick approach and I hope important pads will be recovered soon!