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Classic Google Sites shutting down by September 2021
- easton 6y agoThis isn’t entirely evil. They give you a full HTML dump to host elsewhere, or if you like what they did with the migration, you can just click a button to sign off and they publish it. Just have to hope people notice before their sites go offline.
- sp332 6y agoNo one is looking at most of these old sites. The email addresses are defunct or the authors are dead. Google is deciding to remove huge amounts of web history, again.
- jhrmnn 6y agoTurning off a server on its own isn’t removing web history. Even google cannot be forced to host websites for free indefinitely.
- LunaSea 6y agoI thought that this was what AMP was about. Huh, must have been about something else.
- sp332 6y agoGoogle is still offering to host the sites though. They are just deciding to delete a bunch of them. And while they have a legal right to remove the sites, we can still hold them accountable for how they use that power. Turning off a web server on its own isn't removing web history When Google targets sites that are least likely to have a backup anywhere else, least likely to have active admins, least likely for an admin to notice an email notification in an old inbox, I'm pretty sure that's deleting web history.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- irontinkerer 6y agoSounds good, but I don’t know a lot of “active” Google Sites admins. Is Google going to offer a searchable cache? When I google search a hard question, many times I’m brought to Google Sits We’re going to lose a valuable source of old data if former admins don’t show up, do the work, and rehost
- andybak 6y agoThey could host the static dumps in perpetuity at the same urls. The cost would be a rounding error for them. Any idea if Google donates to The Web Archive Project? I hope so. That would absolve them to some degree. I know a company shouldn't be responsible for storing people's content indefinitely but I hate the fact that human culture has become so transient.
- ghaff 6y agoHuman culture has always been so transient. How many diaries, family photos, letters (even/especially email), etc. from even 30 years ago have been preserved? Much less 100 years. What has been passed down, especially publicly, are pretty rare exceptions.
- minimuffins 6y agoI don't know. In the past a lot of material culture survived for thousands of years by total accident. A lot of objects survived just because nobody ever bothered to destroy them, and could be found later. It's a different situation here. A lot of cultural objects' survival is now contingent on whether their continued existence happens to be profitable for whatever tech firm happens to be maintaining their material infrastructure.
- ghaff 6y agoCertainly digital information has to be deliberately preserved and doing so has challenges relative to anything physical. That said, with a few exceptions (e.g. papyrus in very dry conditions), pretty much anything on paper/parchment needs to be deliberately preserved as well. And, as you get to wetter climates e.g. Britain, there is very little preserved from post-Roman Medieval times. But I won't really argue that preserving the public web should probably be done by public institutions rather than depending almost solely on one non-profit organization. Because it's not reasonable to expect, for example, a website that's been hosted on some provider to be saved forever by that provider once the monthly bill stops being paid. (And that provider will probably go out of business sooner or later anyway.) Do you even want to bet on Google or Facebook being around in 50 or 100 years?
- caiobegotti 6y agoThat migration click is far from working okay. I tried in a very simple-page-text-only-with-paragraphs-one-uploaded-image I had using a Web Font, an embedded Spreadsheet and an embeeded Maps area, all owned by Google. The layout got so broken that I didn't publish it and it's in the draft state after the migration. It looks really shitty.
- iso1210 6y ago"all owned by Google" There's your problem
- JaggedJax 6y agoI just went in to migrate a site of mine as a test and it broke every single image and most or all of the internal links. If they can't even migrate the basics like images and internal links, then they really didn't put much effort into this at all and most people will have lots of work to actually migrate their site.
- gtfoutttt 6y agoHow did you get the full HTML dump? They only gave me a "converted site" in my gdrive when I downloaded from the migration manager.
- bliss 6y agoHa, I have a couple, created in 2011 - who knew (well... remembered!) - now going to archive and delete them
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- xen2xen1 6y agoYeah, I got this message and was surprised that: 1. Such a thing exists. 2. I had a site that was blank. I might even use the new version for however long it lasts.
- TheChaplain 6y agoI hope the archive.org-team may have a shot at the inactive sites before they disappear.
- mkj 6y agoI assume there's some technical problem with classic sites, but it doesn't seem to be described on the support.google site. Anyone know what the reason is?
- tyingq 6y agoClassic sites was based on Jotspot, which they acquired in 2006. I'm pretty sure it was Ruby/Rails at that time. I suspect sites, at some point, didn't make enough money to maintain a separate team with a skill set that wasn't common at Google. It take 16 months after the purchase before they relaunched it, though. So perhaps they had already rewritten it in a Google tech stack?
- snewman 6y agoCorrect. But the Google tech stack evolves, and so the codebase may now be based on obsolete internal technologies. (Source: worked at Google 2006 - 2010, was very slightly involved in helping the Jotspot team integrate)
- rasz 6y agoThe main technical problem with them is nobody at Google was ever promoted for ordinary maintenance.
- steelframe 6y agoThanks to an email I received about this, I rediscovered a site from 2011 that a group of technologists in my domain (myself included) built to track some multi-company collaborative Open Source work. While that ended up going nowhere after about a month or two of wishful thinking, I'm now the hiring manager for a role that requires skills that the members of the group have. Some of them are about to get invites to interview.
- mattzito 6y agoHi folks - my name is Matt, and I lead the "Presentation & Ideation" product team inside of Google/G Suite, which includes Classic and New Sites. This project has been in the works for a while, so I'm happy to answer questions or take feedback here or you can email me at zito@(the google). Obviously my opinions are my own.
- rurban 6y agoHi Matt, What was the rationale for this project? The joy of destruction?
- mattzito 6y agoClassic Sites has been around for a very long time (since 2008), and we've been working to make new Sites a better, more modern, more maintainable place to create and host websites. The vast majority of users are choosing to create their sites with new Sites, and the vast majority of current classic sites receive no edits and no traffic. We first announced this gradual plan in 2017, with an update in 2019, and now we're providing the detailed plan. The goal was to provide adequate notice for people to figure out whether migration, export, or deletion of their classic sites makes the most sense. EDIT: to the multiple people that are highlighting that 12 years is not a long time, I should clarify. I agree that 12 years in Internet time is not a long time, but it is a very long time in "how websites work" time. One of the big challenges in the website builder space, something that Google. Wix, Squarespace, have all dealt with - is that when a user publishes a website, there's an expectation around the fidelity and look-and-feel of that website. The data model and architecture for how you represent a rendered page, how you render embedded content, all are very dependent on how browsers work at that time, and the maintenance of those things can become very challenging. There was a big shift about ~7 years ago, moving away from a "pixel perfect" layout/raw html approach (Wix, Old wordpress, SQSP 5, Classic Sites), to one where there's some sort of grid-and-box approach where the render is responsive, there's reflow, there's padding and spacing and styling relative to the browser experience. It separates out content from layout to a certain degree in a way that is much more future-proofed and modern. This is how Wix ADI, Squarespace 6+, Wordpress Gutenberg, and new Sites work. For all of those transitions, there was a platform shift, that required a complete rework of how the system works. My point about "12 years" was that the model of how classic Sites works is 12 years old, and new Sites was intended to match the modern way of how websites are built and delivered.
- thed0t 6y agoJust chiming in to tell my disastrous experience with the deprecation of Classic Sites. A few weeks ago, we activated GSuite for our organization, and from then on could no longer access our Classic Sites. After a long and confusing support chat session, it turns out that our Classic Sites were simply wiped without a warning when we activated our GSuite for the same domain, because of a bug due to some funky deprecation-stuff of Classic Sites. So yeah, we're pretty pissed that us subscribing to another Google product caused our old stuff to be deleted because of a bug. But it's not that surprising given the rush Google is apparently in to deprecate Classic Sites. Oh, and I don't think Google's gonna take the time to fix this until the final ditch, so be wary if you still have Classic Sites and are getting GSuite soon!
- mattzito 6y agoI'm sorry, this sounds like a terrible experience. If you're comfortable, could you send me an email with the ticket # so myself or someone on the team can look into it? My email is zito@. Any additional context would be helpful too.
- mercer 6y agoacting like it's just a 'terrible experience' and not a fundamental Google issue is a bit disingenuous. I understand you get paid to do this, but have you no shame?
- falcor84 6y agoThat's way too harsh on them. I for one am very glad that someone there acceeded that's it's a terrible experience, regardless of whether they have the ability to change the approach.
- freehunter 6y agoBut this happens every week, and it’s been happening for years. The only way to get the attention of someone at Google is by making a post on HN or Twitter and hoping your audience is big enough that it becomes uncomfortable for Google. Yeah it’s nice that this person is getting help. But what about all the other people who don’t have an audience who can raise their tickets up to this level? Why doesn’t Google support just work the way it’s supposed to work? I’d be willing to celebrate this if it was a rare occurrence but it’s not. It’s way too common. If there are any humans at Google, they sure don’t seem to care about their paying customers.
- prepend 6y agoI got an email yesterday reminding me to take care of my classic sites. The converter theoretically converted the sites, but they went from being a perfectly useful, although basic looking site to looking fucked up and broken. It’s an anti-feature to do this. It’s sort of free, so I can’t make too much of a complaint. But it’s a reminder that nothing Google lasts. I just needed a simple list of google docs 10 years ago for a project. The saddest part is remembering how I felt to have that tool available to me back then. I never expected that Google would turn into whatever they are now. “Organize the world’s information, in a Zip file, in a private cloud folder, making it not useful at all.”
- neonate 6y agoI got that email too, went through the conversion process, and the converted site is completely ruined. None of the images came through, the layout is wrecked, it's unreadable, and the old site is now inaccessible. I wish I had thought to save the old URL in the Internet Archive beforehand, but it never occurred to me that Google's conversion process would just destroy it.
- gundmc 6y agoWhere did the title come from? "September" doesn't appear once on that entire page. There are a number of dates - August 2020, May 2021, October 2021, December 2021, but the September date seems pulled out of the air. Could we update to use the original title? "Transition from classic Sites to new Sites"
- codyogden 6y agoThe standard deprecation notice for G Suite (which includes Google Sites in all its forms) is twelve months from the announcement. > Google will notify Customer at least 12 months before a Significant Deprecation [1] 1. https://gsuite.google.com/terms/2013/1/premier_terms.html https://gsuite.google.com/terms/2013/1/premier_terms.html
- zegl 6y agoSurprisingly, I had 4 sites dating back to 2009 on my account. There was absolutely no content of interest on there, but it was a nice trip down the memory lane for me.
- demadog 6y agoGoogle could make a super compelling product that essentially turned a Google Doc or Sheet file into a website. I know others have done this, but if Google built it and tied it into their Maps product and then ads it would theoretically make it extremely easy for a local barber to control it all in Google and Google would see incremental ad spend. Instead Sites has been ignored, Blogger has languished, and Squarespace and WordPress are now the defacto tools for SMBs. Kind of a head scratcher.
- easton_s 6y ago4 years later and the new sites still doesn't have an API.
- katsume3 6y agoAlso relevant: https://copyblogger.com/digital-sharecropping/ https://copyblogger.com/digital-sharecropping/