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You want the author to do more than just minimal work. The minimal work was the two weeks notice. "I stopped the service as planned, on November 15th, after a t

You want the author to do more than just minimal work. The minimal work was the two weeks notice. "I stopped the service as planned, on November 15th, after a two weeks notice." They had a chance to patch and didn't take advantage of it. If a company is using an external business-critical API and isn't bothering to pay enough attention to it that they see and respond to a two week shutdown notice, nothing is going to make them transition except a hard shutdown. And the service provider's request, to redirect the author's domain to their own endpoint, is obviously a non-starter. Maybe they could have offered to pay the growing hosting bills instead.

stanmancan 11y ago
> They had a chance to patch and didn't take advantage of it. Did they though? From what I can tell, the author never required users to 'sign up' for the API, he simply said here's the end point, here's the format, go at it. That means he is/was unable to reach out directly and notify his users via email. He's relying on them visiting the website on a daily/weekly basis just in case something changes. I don't think that's a very fair expectation to have out of anyone.
- st3v3r 11y ago
  I think that's a pretty big red flag for anyone using the API to think that maybe they should prepare for this thing to go down at any moment.
- dpark 11y ago
  > he simply said here's the end point, here's the format, go at it. I think this is the real lesson. Don't encourage people to take dependencies on you without requiring they give you a way to contact them. Another lesson here is the value of the "scream test". If he'd turned off the service for a 24-hour period, it would have been enough to get most people's attention. This is doubly-true if he returned the 403 with a body that stated when the hard cutoff was.
- detaro 11y ago
  What would you suggest would have been fair in this case?
  - stanmancan 11y ago
    It's totally up to the individual, but if you can't contact your users directly, then I'd start by putting the shut down notice on your page with probably 3 months notice, as well as a warning that there will be a 24-72 hour outage in 30 days time, and another one in 2 months that would be closer to a week long. The outage should be long enough to cause major problems for people relying on it. The emails will come flooding in, turn the service back on, notify the users that contacted you, and they now have X months notice to get it fixed up. At least that way you can feel good that you put an honest effort into trying to notify your users. An update with two weeks notice on your website that the developers have long since forgotten just doesn't cut it.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
mdpopescu 11y ago
Ah... the plans were on display :) https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/40705-but-the-plans-were-on-display-on-display-i-eventually https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/40705-but-the-plans-were-on...

stanmancan 11y ago

> They had a chance to patch and didn't take advantage of it. Did they though? From what I can tell, the author never required users to 'sign up' for the API, he simply said here's the end point, here's the format, go at it. That means he is/was unable to reach out directly and notify his users via email. He's relying on them visiting the website on a daily/weekly basis just in case something changes. I don't think that's a very fair expectation to have out of anyone.

st3v3r 11y ago
I think that's a pretty big red flag for anyone using the API to think that maybe they should prepare for this thing to go down at any moment.
dpark 11y ago
> he simply said here's the end point, here's the format, go at it. I think this is the real lesson. Don't encourage people to take dependencies on you without requiring they give you a way to contact them. Another lesson here is the value of the "scream test". If he'd turned off the service for a 24-hour period, it would have been enough to get most people's attention. This is doubly-true if he returned the 403 with a body that stated when the hard cutoff was.
detaro 11y ago
What would you suggest would have been fair in this case?
- stanmancan 11y ago
  It's totally up to the individual, but if you can't contact your users directly, then I'd start by putting the shut down notice on your page with probably 3 months notice, as well as a warning that there will be a 24-72 hour outage in 30 days time, and another one in 2 months that would be closer to a week long. The outage should be long enough to cause major problems for people relying on it. The emails will come flooding in, turn the service back on, notify the users that contacted you, and they now have X months notice to get it fixed up. At least that way you can feel good that you put an honest effort into trying to notify your users. An update with two weeks notice on your website that the developers have long since forgotten just doesn't cut it.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

mdpopescu 11y ago

Ah... the plans were on display :) https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/40705-but-the-plans-were-on-display-on-display-i-eventually https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/40705-but-the-plans-were-on...