Hiveminder

» see hiveminder.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Best Practical Solutions made RT, the request tracker, which is the ticket system a large share of the world's sysadmins have filed something into at least once. Hiveminder was what happened when the same people wanted a to-do list for themselves and built it out of the same parts. The pitch was RT with the ticket-system apparatus removed, so that you could keep a list with other people and mail a task into it from anywhere.

It started sideways. On 4 July 2006 Jesse Vincent put up a blog post saying they were getting close to launching, and offered five beta accounts to the first five people who commented on it. He announced the thing properly at OSCON later that month, and the launch party was at the company's office in Davis Square, Somerville, that August. A command-line client called todo.pl arrived in September, which tells you accurately who the early users were.

None of this was ever going to reach me. The audience came in through RT or through a conference talk in Portland, and in 2006 I was neither a sysadmin filing tickets for a living nor anywhere near Oregon in July. The to-do list I actually kept that year was a text file.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

Hiveminder Pro opened on 16 January 2008 as the paid tier, and the source they eventually released still carries the proof in its build file, which requires Business::OnlinePayment and the Authorize.Net driver underneath it. The free version stayed free. Best Practical's revenue came from RT support contracts, so the to-do list never had to carry itself.

For a free hosted list in 2007 it shipped an odd amount of machinery: iCal export, OAuth, a Jabber interface, per-user quotas, chart rendering, and somewhere down in the dependency list, Chatbot::Eliza. The internal name never changed across the nine years either. Open the Makefile in the published source and the application still calls itself BTDT.

~ the day it died ~

The last capture of a working Hiveminder is 27 April 2015, a redirect to the login page like every capture before it. By 3 May the domain was serving a splash screen with a bee for a favicon and two short paragraphs. The service had shut down operations. If you had not already pulled your data out you could write to support and they would hold a copy "until the May 8th, whereupon it will be removed". The typo is in the original.

On 1 May at 06:01 UTC, Best Practical created a public repository on GitHub and pushed nine years of Perl into it. Twenty-eight minutes later came the commit titled Switch to GPL2 / Artistic 1.0, to be "as perl". The service had been off for one day.

~ the next chapter ~

The README they published is honest about what was being handed over. It wants PostgreSQL 8.1 or newer and Perl 5.12 or older, with a note that 5.16 and later are known-bad because of changes in how Perl handles overloading and stringification. It wants DBD::Pg below version 3.3.0, and links a specific tarball on CPAN because 3.3.0 changed its Unicode handling in a way Jifty could not follow. This was an archive rather than a relaunch kit. The framework underneath had already stopped moving.

The splash page is still answering in 2026, 881 bytes over plain http, bee favicon intact. Somebody edited it once after 8 May 2015 to turn the promise into a record, so the line now reads that all user data was deleted on May 8th, 2015, and then left it alone for eleven years. It is the only piece of Hiveminder still running.

@}-->--

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