7 ms·

JQuery plugins site accidentally deleted - last backup one year old.

180 points by philjackson 15y ago

badger7 15y ago
Many of us have made that mistake - we're the ones with 'WHERE' tattood on the back of our right hands.
nitrogen 15y ago
Note to badger7: your post appears to be dead. badger7 39 minutes ago | link [dead] Many of us have made that mistake - we're the ones with 'WHERE' tattood on the back of our right hands.
- tim_iles 15y ago
  hell-banned: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=badger7 http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=badger7
Maxious 15y ago
Meh. Previous discussion centered around the distinction between shuttered and shut down. Now that it is a moot point, we can get on with actually having a jQuery plugins database that is more useful than blindly using google hoping to see the right plugin for the job.
- johnx123-up 15y ago
  Yep, I expected the chaos during that discussion. Nowadays, jQuery world is getting weird
oliveoil 15y ago
We are very sorry, but also very excited! Damage controlling like a ninja.
- ricardobeat 15y ago
  they shouldn't be sorry. Developers actively avoided the plugins site for the last few years, as it was nearly useless for finding up-to-date, quality tested and mantained plugins.
  - radimm 15y ago
    And painful for those starting with jQuery/plugins before they realize it's better to look elsewhere... :)
  - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    >Developers actively avoided the plugins site for the last few years // There are several comments on the linked page from people, developers even, that say they hung out there daily.
    - ricardobeat 15y ago
      There were usually multiple plugins (of varying quality) sharing the same name, most outdated, no documentation, sometimes no link to a source repo. It was hard to navigate and slow to search. I work with 6 other front-end devs, none used it.
      - rhizome 15y ago
        Not to mention that the JQ people apparently decided to leave plugin comments as absolutely undifferentiated blocks of text concatenated without the benefit of CSS. In fact, just this one fact has led me to a belief that JQ people are not actually interested in usability. A lot of people talkin', but nobody knows what's going on.
nhebb 15y ago
Nice way to make a clean break. Personally, I wouldn't blame them if they did it on purpose (not that I'm suggesting they did).
RusAlexander 15y ago
if I downloaded any plugin do I need to remove it ?
betageek 15y ago
"Even more unfortunately, I didn’t back up the database before I began this process." That's the takeaway here, no matter how much of a hassle it is backup the DB before you practice delete-fu - no matter how ninja you are you will make a mistake.
- JonnieCache 15y ago
  We had this debate a couple of weeks ago: always clone your DB to a staging or local server and practice on that, and never do your delete-fu in a REPL! But as we all hated that bloody website anyway I doubt anyone will shed a tear. Maybe it was a relational-algebra-based freudian slip...
- billybob 15y ago
  Definitely. And after you back up, do a SELECT, confirm you're seeing the correct records, and only then change the SELECT to a DELETE.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- wvenable 15y ago
  If you have a good setup, you shouldn't need to backup the database before every destructive operation. If I went in and accidentally deleted every user record in my database right now -- the site would crash -- but I would be able to restore the site to the point judt before I screwed it up. This recovery would come from the last full backup and the transaction logs. If my server crashes, the hot replicated backup server will take over. If a hacker destroys both servers and all local backups then I have my last full offsite backup and my nightly off-site transaction log backups so, at most, I'd lose one day. And I'm not much of a sysadmin -- I've a sole developer and I usually sysadmin by Googling everything and using some common sense and yet I still managed to throw this setup together. You would think a site as big and important as jQuery would put have some common-sense backup procedures in place.
- angrycoder 15y ago
  There are two periods in your career when you are most likely to this: when you very little experience or a whole lot of experience. The former because you have no idea what you are doing, the latter because goddamnit I know what I'm doing.
sneak 15y ago
"And nothing of value was lost."
terhechte 15y ago
Apart from the actual takeaway here, it is interesting to see how more and more projects are moving away from Content Management Systems, custom CMS scripts, and related solutions and instead host everything on Github. This is really good, especially because Github has a hell of an interface compared to most home-baked solutions. Another thing that comes to mind here are Jekyll, Hyde, and Toto, content management / blog engines that make it easy to host everything on Github and use it as a storage. Toto even uses Github as the main and only storage.
- skeptical 15y ago
  Github fanoboyism? I don't see why that would be so good. Even if github is the best thing thing in the world after chocolate cookies. Personally I don't like jquery plugins website, I find it clunky. Secondly, I agree that github has a nice slick interface. I still don't think the massive migration to github is a good thing. I would much prefer more diversity. Github doesn't even have a discussion/mailing list platform, I don't think that's a very positive thing for many projects, just to give an example. But mostly I'm curios, 'specially because of their interface', what are the other reasons?
  - schrijver 15y ago
    I would say what’s positive is that more projects are finding ways to move away from a centralised database into a distributed, replicable system such as Git. Github provides an easy-to-use interface to Git, but this way of working is not necessarily limited to GitHub.
- tkrajcar 15y ago
  Except they're still going to use WordPress, which is... a content management system.
Pawka 15y ago
I think this was planned.
nt_mark 15y ago
Can't wait for the announcement that they accidentally deleted all of the lines of code for IE-specific hacks.
pablospr 15y ago
Is anybody else much shocked by this or is it just me?
jasonkester 15y ago
One rule to live by: Never use 3rd party javascript In the 15-odd years I've been doing client-side web development, I've seen precisely one piece of script on the internet that worked as advertised and was durable enough to consider including in one my projects. That exception to the rule is jQuery itself. jQuery plugins, however, exemplify that golden rule. Every time I've tried to use one (being a hopeless optimist and breaking my own rule), I've been bitten hard and ended up either rewriting it from scratch or spending more time trying to get it to work in a reliable manner than it would have taken to rewrite it from scratch. I have no idea why this has to be the case, but it is. Javascript you find on the internet is worse than worthless. As such, while it's a shame they lost their plugin site, we're all probably a little better off for having to write our own stuff for a while.
- lukeholder 15y ago
  I think there are a couple others trustworthy like backbone.js. Most jQuery plugins were spagetti dom manipulations with a config object passed/merged in to defaults. I never trusted that plugin site, and would always make sure the plugin was on github and being actively maintained etc. I really like the idea of https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/ https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/ the stats on last update issue fixed, and popularity metrics helps allot. JS should have the same.
- rufugee 15y ago
  That's an incredibly broad brush you're painting with there. I've used things like jqgrid and datatables for years now with great success.
  - theallan 15y ago
    (Author of DataTables here) Thanks! There are some fantastic plug-ins out there, such as qTip, ColorBox, jqGrid, SlickGrid and many many others. Personally I take great pride in trying to maintain useful, up-to-date documentation, a large battery of unit tests and just generally trying to make the software as useful as possible, for the job that it is intended to do. So there are (hopefully :-) exceptions to the rule!
ergo14 15y ago
This is the reason i'm not touching jquery - everything beyond jquery and jqueryUI - should be untrusted to a degree. I think this should be reminder it's not a bad idea to use more comprehensive solutions like dojo toolkit or YUI.
- ergo14 15y ago
  Why in the world i'm being downvoted? Fact is that plugin repository was deleted and everyone acts like no damage was done. It's perfectly valid to use more full featured js stack and do not depend on 3rd party code that can get unmaintained/disappear any day.
  - drivebyacct2 15y ago
    >Why in the world i'm being downvoted? I imagine it's because we find your attempts to correlate maintence of the plugin repository by jQuery's shepards and the quality of plugins developed by independent people illogical.
    - ergo14 15y ago
      where did i write that? I said that that EXTERNAL plugins can get unmaintained at any point and "vanish" from web - or start getting incompatible with future jquery releases. Which seems perfectly logical to me and it happened before many times.
      - drivebyacct2 15y ago
        > i'm not touching jquery > plugin repository was deleted and everyone acts like no damage was done. Your comments weren't about being wary of using random third party plugins that are likely to go unmaintained. I assume that everyone looks out and is cautious of that, as I do. I presume for example that when searching for django social-auth apps, a high priority in making a choice is the activity and last commit timestamp. Your two comments above just seem to link the plugin repo to hating on jquery in general, which I don't really understand. (for example, the top comment in this thread is basically "be wary of third party javascript", but it's actually phrased that way and it's been much better received)
dhruvbird 15y ago
I think this may be intentional and not accidental to weed out obviously dated plugins. I mean if a developer cares enough about his or her plugin, then they will update it on the new site - is what my guess is about their reasoning.
xxiao 15y ago
when I worked at motorola, there are sysadmins that were fired _immediately_ after they did 'rm -rf /'. on another company, those sysadmin could not recover from a mis-operation either, the whole company lost 4 month of development time. those people, amazingly, still keep their jobs. Adam should leave this project the second day, this kind of error is simply unforgivable.
- emilsedgh 15y ago
  Free and open source projects dont 'fire' their contributors. They appreciate their contribution. He just made an honest mistake. The only sad/odd thing is that they had no daily backups.
- evilduck 15y ago
  Sounds to me like your CTOs should have been fired and the admins kept their jobs. If your company can be crippled by a single box being destroyed, it's probably not the individual devs or admins at fault. An errant 'rm' or damaging programming error is more of a risk than a disk failure or a building fire. If you don't plan for that, your company is making a scapegoat out of the person who made an honest mistake. At my last two companies I worked for, it would have taken multiple geographic regions being simultaneously affected by major catastrophes for 4 months of work to be destroyed, and I'm not even sure that would have done it with any degree of certainty. Where were your redundant source control servers, local and offsite backups, iterative staging environments, etc? Hell, I have all of those at my current workplace and I still keep unofficial backups of everything critical on my workstation. These are all long-established best practices and relatively simple and cheap. The only way I'd fire someone over 'rm -rf /' was if it was done with malicious intent or was one of many examples of someone's ineptitude of negligence. On an open-source project with low/no budget and less checks and balances, I think you have to be even more forgiving.
moe 15y ago
I'm actually glad this terrible site is gone and makes room for something better. Now delete the rest of jquery.com, please! Don't get me wrong, I love jquery. Just the website is an abomination... Curiously a large portion of their target audience consists of web-designers. Has really nobody offered to replace that mess with something good?
pbhjpbhj 15y ago
I bet someone has a more recent [partial] mirror of the site/plugins (even than archive.org), one of the chaps at Google maybe?
jaequery 15y ago
i like a bit of house cleaning, there were a lot of outdated plugins there anyway.
iclelland 15y ago
So, is this the real story behind this post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3310904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3310904 From the original response: "In cleaning up spam on the old site we got a bit overeager and decided it wouldn't make sense to leave the broken remains."

180 points by philjackson 15y ago

Many of us have made that mistake - we're the ones with 'WHERE' tattood on the back of our right hands.

Note to badger7: your post appears to be dead. badger7 39 minutes ago | link [dead] Many of us have made that mistake - we're the ones with 'WHERE' tattood on the back of our right hands.

tim_iles 15y ago
hell-banned: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=badger7 http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=badger7

Maxious 15y ago

Meh. Previous discussion centered around the distinction between shuttered and shut down. Now that it is a moot point, we can get on with actually having a jQuery plugins database that is more useful than blindly using google hoping to see the right plugin for the job.

johnx123-up 15y ago
Yep, I expected the chaos during that discussion. Nowadays, jQuery world is getting weird

oliveoil 15y ago

We are very sorry, but also very excited! Damage controlling like a ninja.

ricardobeat 15y ago
they shouldn't be sorry. Developers actively avoided the plugins site for the last few years, as it was nearly useless for finding up-to-date, quality tested and mantained plugins.
- radimm 15y ago
  And painful for those starting with jQuery/plugins before they realize it's better to look elsewhere... :)
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  >Developers actively avoided the plugins site for the last few years // There are several comments on the linked page from people, developers even, that say they hung out there daily.
  - ricardobeat 15y ago
    There were usually multiple plugins (of varying quality) sharing the same name, most outdated, no documentation, sometimes no link to a source repo. It was hard to navigate and slow to search. I work with 6 other front-end devs, none used it.
    - rhizome 15y ago
      Not to mention that the JQ people apparently decided to leave plugin comments as absolutely undifferentiated blocks of text concatenated without the benefit of CSS. In fact, just this one fact has led me to a belief that JQ people are not actually interested in usability. A lot of people talkin', but nobody knows what's going on.

nhebb 15y ago

Nice way to make a clean break. Personally, I wouldn't blame them if they did it on purpose (not that I'm suggesting they did).

RusAlexander 15y ago

if I downloaded any plugin do I need to remove it ?

betageek 15y ago

"Even more unfortunately, I didn’t back up the database before I began this process." That's the takeaway here, no matter how much of a hassle it is backup the DB before you practice delete-fu - no matter how ninja you are you will make a mistake.

JonnieCache 15y ago
We had this debate a couple of weeks ago: always clone your DB to a staging or local server and practice on that, and never do your delete-fu in a REPL! But as we all hated that bloody website anyway I doubt anyone will shed a tear. Maybe it was a relational-algebra-based freudian slip...
billybob 15y ago
Definitely. And after you back up, do a SELECT, confirm you're seeing the correct records, and only then change the SELECT to a DELETE.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
wvenable 15y ago
If you have a good setup, you shouldn't need to backup the database before every destructive operation. If I went in and accidentally deleted every user record in my database right now -- the site would crash -- but I would be able to restore the site to the point judt before I screwed it up. This recovery would come from the last full backup and the transaction logs. If my server crashes, the hot replicated backup server will take over. If a hacker destroys both servers and all local backups then I have my last full offsite backup and my nightly off-site transaction log backups so, at most, I'd lose one day. And I'm not much of a sysadmin -- I've a sole developer and I usually sysadmin by Googling everything and using some common sense and yet I still managed to throw this setup together. You would think a site as big and important as jQuery would put have some common-sense backup procedures in place.
angrycoder 15y ago
There are two periods in your career when you are most likely to this: when you very little experience or a whole lot of experience. The former because you have no idea what you are doing, the latter because goddamnit I know what I'm doing.

sneak 15y ago

"And nothing of value was lost."

terhechte 15y ago

Apart from the actual takeaway here, it is interesting to see how more and more projects are moving away from Content Management Systems, custom CMS scripts, and related solutions and instead host everything on Github. This is really good, especially because Github has a hell of an interface compared to most home-baked solutions. Another thing that comes to mind here are Jekyll, Hyde, and Toto, content management / blog engines that make it easy to host everything on Github and use it as a storage. Toto even uses Github as the main and only storage.

skeptical 15y ago
Github fanoboyism? I don't see why that would be so good. Even if github is the best thing thing in the world after chocolate cookies. Personally I don't like jquery plugins website, I find it clunky. Secondly, I agree that github has a nice slick interface. I still don't think the massive migration to github is a good thing. I would much prefer more diversity. Github doesn't even have a discussion/mailing list platform, I don't think that's a very positive thing for many projects, just to give an example. But mostly I'm curios, 'specially because of their interface', what are the other reasons?
- schrijver 15y ago
  I would say what’s positive is that more projects are finding ways to move away from a centralised database into a distributed, replicable system such as Git. Github provides an easy-to-use interface to Git, but this way of working is not necessarily limited to GitHub.
tkrajcar 15y ago
Except they're still going to use WordPress, which is... a content management system.

Pawka 15y ago

I think this was planned.

nt_mark 15y ago

Can't wait for the announcement that they accidentally deleted all of the lines of code for IE-specific hacks.

pablospr 15y ago

Is anybody else much shocked by this or is it just me?

jasonkester 15y ago

One rule to live by: Never use 3rd party javascript In the 15-odd years I've been doing client-side web development, I've seen precisely one piece of script on the internet that worked as advertised and was durable enough to consider including in one my projects. That exception to the rule is jQuery itself. jQuery plugins, however, exemplify that golden rule. Every time I've tried to use one (being a hopeless optimist and breaking my own rule), I've been bitten hard and ended up either rewriting it from scratch or spending more time trying to get it to work in a reliable manner than it would have taken to rewrite it from scratch. I have no idea why this has to be the case, but it is. Javascript you find on the internet is worse than worthless. As such, while it's a shame they lost their plugin site, we're all probably a little better off for having to write our own stuff for a while.

lukeholder 15y ago
I think there are a couple others trustworthy like backbone.js. Most jQuery plugins were spagetti dom manipulations with a config object passed/merged in to defaults. I never trusted that plugin site, and would always make sure the plugin was on github and being actively maintained etc. I really like the idea of https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/ https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/ the stats on last update issue fixed, and popularity metrics helps allot. JS should have the same.
rufugee 15y ago
That's an incredibly broad brush you're painting with there. I've used things like jqgrid and datatables for years now with great success.
- theallan 15y ago
  (Author of DataTables here) Thanks! There are some fantastic plug-ins out there, such as qTip, ColorBox, jqGrid, SlickGrid and many many others. Personally I take great pride in trying to maintain useful, up-to-date documentation, a large battery of unit tests and just generally trying to make the software as useful as possible, for the job that it is intended to do. So there are (hopefully :-) exceptions to the rule!

ergo14 15y ago

This is the reason i'm not touching jquery - everything beyond jquery and jqueryUI - should be untrusted to a degree. I think this should be reminder it's not a bad idea to use more comprehensive solutions like dojo toolkit or YUI.

ergo14 15y ago
Why in the world i'm being downvoted? Fact is that plugin repository was deleted and everyone acts like no damage was done. It's perfectly valid to use more full featured js stack and do not depend on 3rd party code that can get unmaintained/disappear any day.
- drivebyacct2 15y ago
  >Why in the world i'm being downvoted? I imagine it's because we find your attempts to correlate maintence of the plugin repository by jQuery's shepards and the quality of plugins developed by independent people illogical.
  - ergo14 15y ago
    where did i write that? I said that that EXTERNAL plugins can get unmaintained at any point and "vanish" from web - or start getting incompatible with future jquery releases. Which seems perfectly logical to me and it happened before many times.
    - drivebyacct2 15y ago
      > i'm not touching jquery > plugin repository was deleted and everyone acts like no damage was done. Your comments weren't about being wary of using random third party plugins that are likely to go unmaintained. I assume that everyone looks out and is cautious of that, as I do. I presume for example that when searching for django social-auth apps, a high priority in making a choice is the activity and last commit timestamp. Your two comments above just seem to link the plugin repo to hating on jquery in general, which I don't really understand. (for example, the top comment in this thread is basically "be wary of third party javascript", but it's actually phrased that way and it's been much better received)

dhruvbird 15y ago

I think this may be intentional and not accidental to weed out obviously dated plugins. I mean if a developer cares enough about his or her plugin, then they will update it on the new site - is what my guess is about their reasoning.

xxiao 15y ago

when I worked at motorola, there are sysadmins that were fired _immediately_ after they did 'rm -rf /'. on another company, those sysadmin could not recover from a mis-operation either, the whole company lost 4 month of development time. those people, amazingly, still keep their jobs. Adam should leave this project the second day, this kind of error is simply unforgivable.

emilsedgh 15y ago
Free and open source projects dont 'fire' their contributors. They appreciate their contribution. He just made an honest mistake. The only sad/odd thing is that they had no daily backups.
evilduck 15y ago
Sounds to me like your CTOs should have been fired and the admins kept their jobs. If your company can be crippled by a single box being destroyed, it's probably not the individual devs or admins at fault. An errant 'rm' or damaging programming error is more of a risk than a disk failure or a building fire. If you don't plan for that, your company is making a scapegoat out of the person who made an honest mistake. At my last two companies I worked for, it would have taken multiple geographic regions being simultaneously affected by major catastrophes for 4 months of work to be destroyed, and I'm not even sure that would have done it with any degree of certainty. Where were your redundant source control servers, local and offsite backups, iterative staging environments, etc? Hell, I have all of those at my current workplace and I still keep unofficial backups of everything critical on my workstation. These are all long-established best practices and relatively simple and cheap. The only way I'd fire someone over 'rm -rf /' was if it was done with malicious intent or was one of many examples of someone's ineptitude of negligence. On an open-source project with low/no budget and less checks and balances, I think you have to be even more forgiving.

moe 15y ago

I'm actually glad this terrible site is gone and makes room for something better. Now delete the rest of jquery.com, please! Don't get me wrong, I love jquery. Just the website is an abomination... Curiously a large portion of their target audience consists of web-designers. Has really nobody offered to replace that mess with something good?

pbhjpbhj 15y ago

I bet someone has a more recent [partial] mirror of the site/plugins (even than archive.org), one of the chaps at Google maybe?

jaequery 15y ago

i like a bit of house cleaning, there were a lot of outdated plugins there anyway.

iclelland 15y ago

So, is this the real story behind this post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3310904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3310904 From the original response: "In cleaning up spam on the old site we got a bit overeager and decided it wouldn't make sense to leave the broken remains."