8 ms·

It's time for us to say farewell

69 points by based2 9y ago

downandout 9y ago
I wonder how much GDPR had to do with bringing them down. For a site like this, blocking EU traffic wouldn't have been a reasonable option, and even for sites smaller than Wikispaces, GDPR compliance can easily cost 7 figures. The timing is likely not a coincidence.
- matthewmacleod 9y ago
  even for sites smaller than Wikispaces, GDPR compliance can easily run into the 7 figures Where on Earth are you getting this number from? It sounds entirely fictional to me. GDPR compliance for small services is a relatively straightforward process.
  - downandout 9y ago
    Where on Earth are you getting this number from? From the consultants I have spoken with and looking at the issue for my own company. Depending on what your service does, the process of GDPR compliance can be incredibly complex and involve rewriting a significant percentage of your code. Even then, you may not be in the clear because it is up for unique interpretations in the courts of 28 distinct countries. It is, quite simply, a mess. Maybe it's one that will work out to users' benefit in the end, but that doesn't help the companies trying to serve them that don't have millions of dollars to spend on compliance.
    - codingdave 9y ago
      Does it cost 7 figures if you don't hire consultants?
      - downandout 9y ago
        Depends. If you happen to be both a lawyer that is well versed in the laws of all 28 EU countries, who can divine how each country will interpret and enforce the law, and also a coder with lots of time on your hands to implement in code what you hope is the correct interpretation of these laws, you may be able to do it for free. Most companies don't have a person like this though, and need to rely on outside experts for one or both of these.
        user5994461 9y ago
        The interpretation of laws and specific contexts are usually relatively straightforward for people who are trained in legal speak, not engineers. There should be hardly any change needed as long as the service only gathers data that is required for it and users are willingly using the service. The problem if for companies that do heavy identification of users against their will like in adtech or companies that gather and resell personal information.
        gerdesj 9y ago
        Bollocks! First off: GDPR will be harmonised across all 28 member states (not countries) - that's the point of it. For example in the UK, the current Data Protection Act of 1998 will be superseded by GDPR (https://www.itgovernance.co.uk/data-protection https://www.itgovernance.co.uk/data-protection) You do not need to be a lawyer to understand GDPR, you merely need the ability to read, and have a few hours to devote to research. Implementing a policy that is compatible with GDPR is not hard. It does require some thought and some time and will need some training across your organisation. If you do not have a market in the EU then it need not worry you at all. Funnily enough, if you bin (or neuter) those social icons and a few .js thingies from your website you'll be well on the way. Now think about how you would like to be treated, personally ... yep - you'll be fine. No lawyers needed and certainly not seven figure sums for handwaving. You really can use research and common sense and some time, to do the job in house effectively. I might politely suggest that it is a pretty good standard to work to anyway: it is designed to protect the privacy of individual people. I consider myself an individual and perhaps you do too.
        9y ago
      - mst 9y ago
        My employer, https://shadow.cat/ https://shadow.cat/ is offering GDPR compliance consultancy, and so far the take away has been "if you're a non-tech company, it's not honestly that hard" plus "if you're a tech company, it's only hard if your entire business model is built around exploiting your customers' data". If it costs 7 figures to hire consultants, either your business model was parasitic in the first place or your consultants are attempting to fleece you. (if you don't believe me, email mdk@shadowcat.co.uk and ask - I run the tech team, I'm not nearly as much of an expert on the rules as he is - and if you're emailing him to ask with no intention to pay us anything, that's fine, just make sure to blame me)
    - matthewmacleod 9y ago
      I’m sorry, I have a great deal of difficulty believing this. there are essentially no situations in which GDPR compliance should be particularly onerous. The principles are pretty simple, and while it will take some time until there is clarity on edge cases, most actions required should be straigtforward. I’d be fascinated to know what product you build that is so inextricably tied to user data that it will cost “millions” to comply.
      - downandout 9y ago
        I’m sorry, I have a great deal of difficulty believing this. Then you obviously haven’t read the whole thing or had to comply with it.
        matthewmacleod 9y ago
        I have done both. It it possible that you’ve been fleeced by your consultants? You’ve notably avoided talking what you’re doing that would require onerous compliance, details of which would go at least part way towards substantiating our rather unbelievable ideas about the cost of compliance.
        downandout 9y ago
        Have you done a search to verify that others feel that GDPR compliance is easy and cheap? I think you’re way off base here, and I’m not alone.
        matthewmacleod 9y ago
        Yeah, anybody I’ve met with experience is pretty confident in that. The people I’ve met who aren’t fall into three categories: 1. People who don’t know much about the rules and have concocted a distorted version of them 2. People who are running a business that relies on misuse of personal data and who will be directly affected 3. People who have some ideological or politicical viewpoint which generally opposes regulation. I have encountered no situation where someone has been able to demonstrate to me a convincing case where GDPR compliance is onerous, or indeed more work than any best practices they should have already been following.
- Multicomp 9y ago
  I hope this doesn't become a regular occurrence. EU regs in this case may end up doing a lot of collateral damage, and possibly even (unlikely to me) more damage than good as a result.
- laumars 9y ago
  I doubt this had much to do with GDPR given the advanced shutdown notice Wikispaces have given, which means their service will still be active long after GDPR comes into effect. If GDPR was an issue then they'd have released this notice last year instead. > The timing is likely not a coincidence. Online services shutdown all the time. I appreciate it's human nature to find patterns but this doesn't strike me as one of those occasions it's warranted.
  - downandout 9y ago
    I doubt this had much to do with GDPR given the advanced shutdown notice Wikispaces have given, which means their service will still be active long after GDPR comes into effect. That's possible, however it could also be that they've cleared any money that they could be fined for out of the LLC and are just hoping that rudimentary measures will be enough to get them by without much hassle from EU regulators even if they aren't in full compliance, while giving enough warning to users to be courteous.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - laumars 9y ago
      You're overthinking it in my opinion. If it were GDPR related then you could bet they'd have added something about that. More likely is they just have years of tech debt and their operating profit isn't high enough to warrant the reinvestment into the platform. Particularly if their paying membership has been in decline (or even just stagnating). They're in a crowded space and sometimes it's better to bail out while you're still in the black rather than throwing money at a problem that simply is never going to see high returns anyway. Also for what it's worth the EU isn't some evil organisation that will go after every single business until everyone is bankrupt. There seems to be a fair amount of hysteria in your post about just how negatively GDPR will affect the average online business. So long as you handle your data properly and don't work in the ad / social media industry or other sectors where your business is selling user data, you don't have much to worry about. Frankly I welcome the GDPR.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > GDPR compliance can easily cost 7 figures That's just bullshit. GDPR compliance isn't a thing you can get accredited for in the first place and besides that any company that (1) respects their users and their data and (2) has proper security in place is most likely going to already be mostly compliant before they even start. If you're into adtech and your hobby is to try to find exactly what is and isn't legal then yes, it will cost you but for a normal business that acts in good faith you are looking at much more modest figures than the one you quote.
  - downandout 9y ago
    (1) respects their users and their data and (2) has proper security in place is most likely going to already be mostly compliant before they even start. If the law said this, and only this, that would be fine. But that's not what it says. It's a very complex law subject to unique interpretations in the courts of 28 unique countries. GDPR compliance isn't a thing you can get accredited for in the first place Did I say you could get accredited for it? I didn't, but nevertheless, you have to comply with the law (or block EU traffic, if you don't rely on it), and doing so can be very expensive.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      > If the law said this, and only this, that would be fine. But that's not what it says. It's a very complex law subject to unique interpretations in the courts of 28 unique countries. Sure you can make it as complex as you want. But the practical upshot is this: as long as you are going around using FUD rather than fact to pretend that the GDPR is unworkable you're setting yourself up for a nasty surprise. Instead go and make a 'best effort' and spend a few productive weeks on getting rid of the most obvious differences between where you are today and where the law says you should be and you will be doing better than most and will be able to sleep just fine because just like with running away from hungry lions you only have to run faster than the competition. And as long as you're not in fintech, social media, advertising, medtech, insurance or doing something really shady you most likely will be fine anyway because those segments are where the majority of the people that I talk to about this subject expect the first action. The courts of '28 unique countries' are not each and every one of them going to give a unique interpretation of this law. What you can expect is that starting 2019 or so a couple of serious offenders will be first warned and then fined to show the rest of the world they're not dicking around this time so make-believe arguments won't cut it. I'm pretty happy that the GDPR exists, the business world had a bowshot in the form of the cookie law, that got ignored or arm-chair legalesed into an ineffective operation when everybody had the option to actually comply with the spirit of the law as well as the letter (the spirit: stop tricking users everywhere: the letter: put up a cookie wall and continue tracking like before once the user inevitably clicks 'ok'). When industries fail to self-regulate sooner or later regulators step in. In this case it is later but as laws come the GDPR is surprisingly clear and accessible.
- oldcynic 9y ago
  You don't think that if it were anything to do with GDPR it would have at least rated a sentence on their closure page? So why try and make a conspiracy theory of it?
  - downandout 9y ago
    Wikispaces has operated for 13 years. It isn't the least bit curious to you that they are announcing its closure less than a month before GDPR comes to life, complaining that "...[bringing the] code in line with modern standards is very substantial"?
    - gerdesj 9y ago
      Code != data Do I really have to spell it out?
      - downandout 9y ago
        Umm..wut? The code that controls how data is handled must be entirely rewritten. Also, code has to be written to enable new functions dictated to us by our friends in the EU, such as being able to easily delete and/or download all data submitted to the site.
    - oldcynic 9y ago
      Sounds more like they are unable to maintain the code since the TES takeover. Perhaps from having a fraction of the former team or being an unmaintainable fur-ball? TES are a long standing UK company so Wikispaces will have already been subject to the Data Protection Act if there is any possible GDPR angle. DPA wasn't so different, GDPR just adds, modernises and adjusts.
- klenwell 9y ago
  > I wonder how much GDPR had to do with bringing them down. Since they didn't cite that as a reason, I am going to conclude none. Even if they did cite it, I would still be inclined to assume it was being offered as a palatable pretext for a simpler baser bottom-line-driven business decision. A little Googling shows that TES Global acquired Wikispaces in 2014: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140304006078/en/Wikispaces-Acquired-TSL-Expanding-World%E2%80%99s-Largest-Single-Profession https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140304006078/en/Wik... TES appears to fancy itself a social network. Wikis are a slightly different animal. And now that TES has Wikispaces users in pocket, I imagine they could care less about maintaining a wiki platform.
  - downandout 9y ago
    >I imagine they could care less about maintaining a wiki platform And yet they spent money to buy it just a few short years ago. Seems odd doesn't it? I have been on the Wikispaces site within the last year, and there were no obvious attempts to get me to sign up for any other site, so this was not a grab at users. Now they're closing less than a month before GDPR takes effect (after 13 years of operation), citing the high cost of keeping up with modern standards. While they didn't specifically mention GDPR, I'd say the likelihood that it had no impact is roughly 0. They wouldn't be the first company to pull out of EU over GDPR, nor would they be the last. Here's one example: https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2017/12/gdpr-stopped-selling-stuff-europe/ https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2017/12/gdpr-stopped-selli... . According to that blog post, even Microsoft shutdown a specific service due to GDPR compliance issues.
- duskwuff 9y ago
  The cost of GDPR compliance depends in large part on what personally identifiable information a company collects, from whom it is collected, and what they do with it. For a company like Google or Facebook, which collects a broad variety of PII from users all over the Internet and shares extracts of that data with advertisers, compliance is a big deal. For a company like Wikispaces, which is unlikely to collect much (if any) PII, compliance is relatively straightforward.
filenox 9y ago
FYI: Wikispaces is a wiki hosting service based in San Francisco, California. Launched by Tangient LLC in March 2005, Wikispaces was purchased by TSL Education in March 2014. It competes with PBworks, Wetpaint, Wikia, and Google Sites (formerly JotSpot). It was among the largest wiki hosts.[Wikipedia]
- jodrellblank 9y ago
  It was a paid-for service, run into the ground with technical debt to the point where it's an economic write-off? Is someone at TSL Education going to be sweating about the due diligence they should have done?
  - candiodari 9y ago
    Read the article : it was a trade off. Paying the technical debt when designing the tool would simply have made them fail far faster. Having this tool, correctly designed, was too expensive and not worth what people were willing to pay for it. We still had the tool because it was hacked together.
ams6110 9y ago
Sort of a bullshit reason. Too expensive to "bring the infrastructure and code in line with modern standards." What does that mean? Why is it necessary to do that at the expense of shutting down the service?
- reificator 9y ago
  Major security or stability bugs resulting in increased operational costs over time? Ones that are difficult to fix with the current infrastructure and codebase?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - barrkel 9y ago
    Op-ex exceeds revenue to the point that operating capital is better invested elsewhere. Some things possibly adding step changes to the costs can be regulatory (GDPR) and patching (outdated dependencies having no obvious upgrade paths). The latter is a killer, especially if it's a platform going away, eg some LTS OS.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  What it means is that they have let their technical debt accrue to the point where they feel the only way forward is too costly to justify the work. It happens to 'cash cows' that are only milked but not fed. Eventually the cow dies of malnutrition.
- user5994461 9y ago
  From my understanding, the code is lost or there is noone who knows how to run the software or the infrastructure. These are real problems that can kill a company. The only resolution is to rewrite or reverse engineer everything, not an option for old software with little revenues.
- keerthiko 9y ago
  They are declaring technical bankruptcy.
ggg9990 9y ago
My guess: in trying to do GDPR compliance they basically did their first real code change in years. They found that everything was an undocumented web of dependencies and that even starting to understand the problem was months or years of operating profit. At that point they decided to shitcan the whole thing.
- gerdesj 9y ago
  This is an American (USA) organisation. What on earth has GDPR (an EU thing) got to do with them? I note that the do not mention GDPR anywhere on the homepage. This reads to me like "our business model is no longer viable" or "income is less than expenditure". * Over the last twelve months we have been carrying out a complete technical review of the infrastructure and software we use to serve Wikispaces users. As part of the review, it has become apparent that the required investment to bring the infrastructure and code in line with modern standards is very substantial.
  - KeitIG 9y ago
    GDPR is about users, not companies/organizations. If I’m not mistaken, it applies to all persons in the EU (not « living there », or « citizen », literally everyone one currently « in » the EU). So this is totally possible.
    - megaman22 9y ago
      GDPR is going to be a tax on software for a good chunk of time, and probably a decent source of employment for engineers, as companies wake up and realize that they now have to deal with it. Unless there specifically are requirements to make deleting user data easy, or even possible, that's probably been punted on for years in most software products.
      - gerdesj 9y ago
        GDPR is going to be a tax on software for a good chunk of time Unless you are Facebook or Google or Amazon or Microsoft (etc), most reasonably responsible companies will already be very close to GDPR compliance. The regulations really are not too onerous. "Don't be evil" might cover it ...
askvictor 9y ago
GDPR might be a small factor, but that space has changed a lot over the past 13 years. Google giving schools free access to G-Suite, (including sites) pretty much killed usage of wikispaces in schools that took up Google. Other online collaborative tools and LMSs have no doubt eaten other parts of their education market. And facebook has probably eaten a lot of their community lunch.
davvolun 9y ago
The copyright on that page hasn't been updated since 2015. Color me surprised...

69 points by based2 9y ago

I wonder how much GDPR had to do with bringing them down. For a site like this, blocking EU traffic wouldn't have been a reasonable option, and even for sites smaller than Wikispaces, GDPR compliance can easily cost 7 figures. The timing is likely not a coincidence.

matthewmacleod 9y ago
even for sites smaller than Wikispaces, GDPR compliance can easily run into the 7 figures Where on Earth are you getting this number from? It sounds entirely fictional to me. GDPR compliance for small services is a relatively straightforward process.
- downandout 9y ago
  Where on Earth are you getting this number from? From the consultants I have spoken with and looking at the issue for my own company. Depending on what your service does, the process of GDPR compliance can be incredibly complex and involve rewriting a significant percentage of your code. Even then, you may not be in the clear because it is up for unique interpretations in the courts of 28 distinct countries. It is, quite simply, a mess. Maybe it's one that will work out to users' benefit in the end, but that doesn't help the companies trying to serve them that don't have millions of dollars to spend on compliance.
  - codingdave 9y ago
    Does it cost 7 figures if you don't hire consultants?
    - downandout 9y ago
      Depends. If you happen to be both a lawyer that is well versed in the laws of all 28 EU countries, who can divine how each country will interpret and enforce the law, and also a coder with lots of time on your hands to implement in code what you hope is the correct interpretation of these laws, you may be able to do it for free. Most companies don't have a person like this though, and need to rely on outside experts for one or both of these.
      - user5994461 9y ago
        The interpretation of laws and specific contexts are usually relatively straightforward for people who are trained in legal speak, not engineers. There should be hardly any change needed as long as the service only gathers data that is required for it and users are willingly using the service. The problem if for companies that do heavy identification of users against their will like in adtech or companies that gather and resell personal information.
      - gerdesj 9y ago
        Bollocks! First off: GDPR will be harmonised across all 28 member states (not countries) - that's the point of it. For example in the UK, the current Data Protection Act of 1998 will be superseded by GDPR (https://www.itgovernance.co.uk/data-protection https://www.itgovernance.co.uk/data-protection) You do not need to be a lawyer to understand GDPR, you merely need the ability to read, and have a few hours to devote to research. Implementing a policy that is compatible with GDPR is not hard. It does require some thought and some time and will need some training across your organisation. If you do not have a market in the EU then it need not worry you at all. Funnily enough, if you bin (or neuter) those social icons and a few .js thingies from your website you'll be well on the way. Now think about how you would like to be treated, personally ... yep - you'll be fine. No lawyers needed and certainly not seven figure sums for handwaving. You really can use research and common sense and some time, to do the job in house effectively. I might politely suggest that it is a pretty good standard to work to anyway: it is designed to protect the privacy of individual people. I consider myself an individual and perhaps you do too.
        9y ago
    - mst 9y ago
      My employer, https://shadow.cat/ https://shadow.cat/ is offering GDPR compliance consultancy, and so far the take away has been "if you're a non-tech company, it's not honestly that hard" plus "if you're a tech company, it's only hard if your entire business model is built around exploiting your customers' data". If it costs 7 figures to hire consultants, either your business model was parasitic in the first place or your consultants are attempting to fleece you. (if you don't believe me, email mdk@shadowcat.co.uk and ask - I run the tech team, I'm not nearly as much of an expert on the rules as he is - and if you're emailing him to ask with no intention to pay us anything, that's fine, just make sure to blame me)
  - matthewmacleod 9y ago
    I’m sorry, I have a great deal of difficulty believing this. there are essentially no situations in which GDPR compliance should be particularly onerous. The principles are pretty simple, and while it will take some time until there is clarity on edge cases, most actions required should be straigtforward. I’d be fascinated to know what product you build that is so inextricably tied to user data that it will cost “millions” to comply.
    - downandout 9y ago
      I’m sorry, I have a great deal of difficulty believing this. Then you obviously haven’t read the whole thing or had to comply with it.
      - matthewmacleod 9y ago
        I have done both. It it possible that you’ve been fleeced by your consultants? You’ve notably avoided talking what you’re doing that would require onerous compliance, details of which would go at least part way towards substantiating our rather unbelievable ideas about the cost of compliance.
        downandout 9y ago
        Have you done a search to verify that others feel that GDPR compliance is easy and cheap? I think you’re way off base here, and I’m not alone.
        matthewmacleod 9y ago
        Yeah, anybody I’ve met with experience is pretty confident in that. The people I’ve met who aren’t fall into three categories: 1. People who don’t know much about the rules and have concocted a distorted version of them 2. People who are running a business that relies on misuse of personal data and who will be directly affected 3. People who have some ideological or politicical viewpoint which generally opposes regulation. I have encountered no situation where someone has been able to demonstrate to me a convincing case where GDPR compliance is onerous, or indeed more work than any best practices they should have already been following.
Multicomp 9y ago
I hope this doesn't become a regular occurrence. EU regs in this case may end up doing a lot of collateral damage, and possibly even (unlikely to me) more damage than good as a result.
laumars 9y ago
I doubt this had much to do with GDPR given the advanced shutdown notice Wikispaces have given, which means their service will still be active long after GDPR comes into effect. If GDPR was an issue then they'd have released this notice last year instead. > The timing is likely not a coincidence. Online services shutdown all the time. I appreciate it's human nature to find patterns but this doesn't strike me as one of those occasions it's warranted.
- downandout 9y ago
  I doubt this had much to do with GDPR given the advanced shutdown notice Wikispaces have given, which means their service will still be active long after GDPR comes into effect. That's possible, however it could also be that they've cleared any money that they could be fined for out of the LLC and are just hoping that rudimentary measures will be enough to get them by without much hassle from EU regulators even if they aren't in full compliance, while giving enough warning to users to be courteous.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - laumars 9y ago
    You're overthinking it in my opinion. If it were GDPR related then you could bet they'd have added something about that. More likely is they just have years of tech debt and their operating profit isn't high enough to warrant the reinvestment into the platform. Particularly if their paying membership has been in decline (or even just stagnating). They're in a crowded space and sometimes it's better to bail out while you're still in the black rather than throwing money at a problem that simply is never going to see high returns anyway. Also for what it's worth the EU isn't some evil organisation that will go after every single business until everyone is bankrupt. There seems to be a fair amount of hysteria in your post about just how negatively GDPR will affect the average online business. So long as you handle your data properly and don't work in the ad / social media industry or other sectors where your business is selling user data, you don't have much to worry about. Frankly I welcome the GDPR.
jacquesm 9y ago
> GDPR compliance can easily cost 7 figures That's just bullshit. GDPR compliance isn't a thing you can get accredited for in the first place and besides that any company that (1) respects their users and their data and (2) has proper security in place is most likely going to already be mostly compliant before they even start. If you're into adtech and your hobby is to try to find exactly what is and isn't legal then yes, it will cost you but for a normal business that acts in good faith you are looking at much more modest figures than the one you quote.
- downandout 9y ago
  (1) respects their users and their data and (2) has proper security in place is most likely going to already be mostly compliant before they even start. If the law said this, and only this, that would be fine. But that's not what it says. It's a very complex law subject to unique interpretations in the courts of 28 unique countries. GDPR compliance isn't a thing you can get accredited for in the first place Did I say you could get accredited for it? I didn't, but nevertheless, you have to comply with the law (or block EU traffic, if you don't rely on it), and doing so can be very expensive.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    > If the law said this, and only this, that would be fine. But that's not what it says. It's a very complex law subject to unique interpretations in the courts of 28 unique countries. Sure you can make it as complex as you want. But the practical upshot is this: as long as you are going around using FUD rather than fact to pretend that the GDPR is unworkable you're setting yourself up for a nasty surprise. Instead go and make a 'best effort' and spend a few productive weeks on getting rid of the most obvious differences between where you are today and where the law says you should be and you will be doing better than most and will be able to sleep just fine because just like with running away from hungry lions you only have to run faster than the competition. And as long as you're not in fintech, social media, advertising, medtech, insurance or doing something really shady you most likely will be fine anyway because those segments are where the majority of the people that I talk to about this subject expect the first action. The courts of '28 unique countries' are not each and every one of them going to give a unique interpretation of this law. What you can expect is that starting 2019 or so a couple of serious offenders will be first warned and then fined to show the rest of the world they're not dicking around this time so make-believe arguments won't cut it. I'm pretty happy that the GDPR exists, the business world had a bowshot in the form of the cookie law, that got ignored or arm-chair legalesed into an ineffective operation when everybody had the option to actually comply with the spirit of the law as well as the letter (the spirit: stop tricking users everywhere: the letter: put up a cookie wall and continue tracking like before once the user inevitably clicks 'ok'). When industries fail to self-regulate sooner or later regulators step in. In this case it is later but as laws come the GDPR is surprisingly clear and accessible.
oldcynic 9y ago
You don't think that if it were anything to do with GDPR it would have at least rated a sentence on their closure page? So why try and make a conspiracy theory of it?
- downandout 9y ago
  Wikispaces has operated for 13 years. It isn't the least bit curious to you that they are announcing its closure less than a month before GDPR comes to life, complaining that "...[bringing the] code in line with modern standards is very substantial"?
  - gerdesj 9y ago
    Code != data Do I really have to spell it out?
    - downandout 9y ago
      Umm..wut? The code that controls how data is handled must be entirely rewritten. Also, code has to be written to enable new functions dictated to us by our friends in the EU, such as being able to easily delete and/or download all data submitted to the site.
  - oldcynic 9y ago
    Sounds more like they are unable to maintain the code since the TES takeover. Perhaps from having a fraction of the former team or being an unmaintainable fur-ball? TES are a long standing UK company so Wikispaces will have already been subject to the Data Protection Act if there is any possible GDPR angle. DPA wasn't so different, GDPR just adds, modernises and adjusts.
klenwell 9y ago
> I wonder how much GDPR had to do with bringing them down. Since they didn't cite that as a reason, I am going to conclude none. Even if they did cite it, I would still be inclined to assume it was being offered as a palatable pretext for a simpler baser bottom-line-driven business decision. A little Googling shows that TES Global acquired Wikispaces in 2014: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140304006078/en/Wikispaces-Acquired-TSL-Expanding-World%E2%80%99s-Largest-Single-Profession https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140304006078/en/Wik... TES appears to fancy itself a social network. Wikis are a slightly different animal. And now that TES has Wikispaces users in pocket, I imagine they could care less about maintaining a wiki platform.
- downandout 9y ago
  >I imagine they could care less about maintaining a wiki platform And yet they spent money to buy it just a few short years ago. Seems odd doesn't it? I have been on the Wikispaces site within the last year, and there were no obvious attempts to get me to sign up for any other site, so this was not a grab at users. Now they're closing less than a month before GDPR takes effect (after 13 years of operation), citing the high cost of keeping up with modern standards. While they didn't specifically mention GDPR, I'd say the likelihood that it had no impact is roughly 0. They wouldn't be the first company to pull out of EU over GDPR, nor would they be the last. Here's one example: https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2017/12/gdpr-stopped-selling-stuff-europe/ https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2017/12/gdpr-stopped-selli... . According to that blog post, even Microsoft shutdown a specific service due to GDPR compliance issues.
duskwuff 9y ago
The cost of GDPR compliance depends in large part on what personally identifiable information a company collects, from whom it is collected, and what they do with it. For a company like Google or Facebook, which collects a broad variety of PII from users all over the Internet and shares extracts of that data with advertisers, compliance is a big deal. For a company like Wikispaces, which is unlikely to collect much (if any) PII, compliance is relatively straightforward.

filenox 9y ago

FYI: Wikispaces is a wiki hosting service based in San Francisco, California. Launched by Tangient LLC in March 2005, Wikispaces was purchased by TSL Education in March 2014. It competes with PBworks, Wetpaint, Wikia, and Google Sites (formerly JotSpot). It was among the largest wiki hosts.[Wikipedia]

jodrellblank 9y ago
It was a paid-for service, run into the ground with technical debt to the point where it's an economic write-off? Is someone at TSL Education going to be sweating about the due diligence they should have done?
- candiodari 9y ago
  Read the article : it was a trade off. Paying the technical debt when designing the tool would simply have made them fail far faster. Having this tool, correctly designed, was too expensive and not worth what people were willing to pay for it. We still had the tool because it was hacked together.

ams6110 9y ago

Sort of a bullshit reason. Too expensive to "bring the infrastructure and code in line with modern standards." What does that mean? Why is it necessary to do that at the expense of shutting down the service?

reificator 9y ago
Major security or stability bugs resulting in increased operational costs over time? Ones that are difficult to fix with the current infrastructure and codebase?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- barrkel 9y ago
  Op-ex exceeds revenue to the point that operating capital is better invested elsewhere. Some things possibly adding step changes to the costs can be regulatory (GDPR) and patching (outdated dependencies having no obvious upgrade paths). The latter is a killer, especially if it's a platform going away, eg some LTS OS.
jacquesm 9y ago
What it means is that they have let their technical debt accrue to the point where they feel the only way forward is too costly to justify the work. It happens to 'cash cows' that are only milked but not fed. Eventually the cow dies of malnutrition.
user5994461 9y ago
From my understanding, the code is lost or there is noone who knows how to run the software or the infrastructure. These are real problems that can kill a company. The only resolution is to rewrite or reverse engineer everything, not an option for old software with little revenues.
keerthiko 9y ago
They are declaring technical bankruptcy.

ggg9990 9y ago

My guess: in trying to do GDPR compliance they basically did their first real code change in years. They found that everything was an undocumented web of dependencies and that even starting to understand the problem was months or years of operating profit. At that point they decided to shitcan the whole thing.

gerdesj 9y ago
This is an American (USA) organisation. What on earth has GDPR (an EU thing) got to do with them? I note that the do not mention GDPR anywhere on the homepage. This reads to me like "our business model is no longer viable" or "income is less than expenditure". * Over the last twelve months we have been carrying out a complete technical review of the infrastructure and software we use to serve Wikispaces users. As part of the review, it has become apparent that the required investment to bring the infrastructure and code in line with modern standards is very substantial.
- KeitIG 9y ago
  GDPR is about users, not companies/organizations. If I’m not mistaken, it applies to all persons in the EU (not « living there », or « citizen », literally everyone one currently « in » the EU). So this is totally possible.
  - megaman22 9y ago
    GDPR is going to be a tax on software for a good chunk of time, and probably a decent source of employment for engineers, as companies wake up and realize that they now have to deal with it. Unless there specifically are requirements to make deleting user data easy, or even possible, that's probably been punted on for years in most software products.
    - gerdesj 9y ago
      GDPR is going to be a tax on software for a good chunk of time Unless you are Facebook or Google or Amazon or Microsoft (etc), most reasonably responsible companies will already be very close to GDPR compliance. The regulations really are not too onerous. "Don't be evil" might cover it ...

askvictor 9y ago

GDPR might be a small factor, but that space has changed a lot over the past 13 years. Google giving schools free access to G-Suite, (including sites) pretty much killed usage of wikispaces in schools that took up Google. Other online collaborative tools and LMSs have no doubt eaten other parts of their education market. And facebook has probably eaten a lot of their community lunch.

davvolun 9y ago