
Notice of Shutdown - chejazi
https://www.docracy.com/shutdown
======
zekevermillion
It was very generous of the founders to arrange to keep Docracy up for this
long, even after the business was shelved. I enjoyed seeing the stats on the
few docs I had shared on Docracy over the years. The business model was
obviously not quite there, although there is perpetual interest in any kind of
tech that reduces legal costs. It is a shame that firms are so jealous about
sharing knowledge publicly.

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reustle
I would love to see some of these projects simply go open source, or have an
'open for offers' time for other companies to bid on taking over operations.
I'm sure many people (myself included) would be happy to keep services like
this running, instead of simply turning the lights out and putting the code in
the trash.

~~~
tcd
> I'm sure many people (myself included) would be happy to keep services like
> this running

Why don't you then? Send an email saying you're willing to donate whatever it
costs to keep the servers running.

Yeah. Thought so.

~~~
setr
A thousand people running various size instances of the service versus a
single company running it for everyone has significantly different cost
properties, for each involved party

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driverdan
Is this something that Internet Archive or Public Resource would take over?
Seems like it'd be best under a NFP.

~~~
zekevermillion
Many of the forms are scraped from EDGAR anyway, so if you really need a
standard contract you can usually find an exemplar. Typical startup docs can
be had from Series Seed, NVCA, Clerky or one of the many marketing sites like
cooleygo. I wish there was a more focused and well-funded effort by the big
firms to agree on standard forms, and to annotate them. But people who have
tried can tell you it is a Sisyphean task to actually make this happen.

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s0l1dsnak3123
This is a shame! I've been using Docracy for years as a good, free alternative
to echosign. Hopefully something similar will spring up in its place.

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52-6F-62
Is there any similar service to Docracy or will they be leaving a noticeable
void?

~~~
nikanj
They’re shutting down, because not enough people are using them. Not sure if
that means the void is unnoticeable.

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t0mbstone
I find it really irritating when project like this decide to just shut down
without any alternative. Why not give your users some options? After all, your
users are the people who generated all of the free content for your site. It's
the least you can do.

For example, instead of shutting down, you could open source it, or at least
allow people to download and host their own mirror.

If you aren't willing to do that, then why not offer some kind of paid option
or donation option?

I get it. Their dream was for the site to be free and ad supported. But if
their hosting costs are that high, at least give people the option of pitching
in! It would take 5 minutes to post a paypal link or a bitcoin link. But nope,
they haven't even done that.

Ugh. So irritating.

~~~
turc1656
I am planning on doing a site rip for my personal reference, in case I need to
leverage any of these documents in the future. I've never used the site before
but it seems like a nice resource that I would like to have.

If I do the site rip are you interested in obtaining a copy?

EDIT - in case it wasn't obvious, I am only interested in and referring to the
publicly available documents aspect of Docracy, which is what I assumed you
were talking about. But I realize you may be using their other, private
features like holding private contracts and digitally signed documents. If you
are interesting in my pending rip of the freely available documents, let me
know.

~~~
t0mbstone
Sure! I'm definitely interested! Thank you for doing that work. I was thinking
about doing it myself, to be completely honest...

~~~
turc1656
Would you mind putting your contact email in your profile? The other commenter
intersted in this (manglav) already has this in their profile. I need a way to
contact you.

FYI - this should be done very shortly. I ran the script last night to scrape
the site of all the relevant info. The actual download of all the files is
running right now.

~~~
t0mbstone
I'd rather not publicly tie my email address to my hacker news profile... Is
there any way you could reply to this comment with a download link?

I would also be happy to tip you some bitcoin for your trouble, if you give me
a bitcoin address

~~~
turc1656
No need for the BTC, but I appreciate the offer.

[https://www.4shared.com/zip/AdAKc8akca/Docracy_Site_Rip.html](https://www.4shared.com/zip/AdAKc8akca/Docracy_Site_Rip.html)

You'll need a (free) account to download from that site if you don't already
have one. You can create one just for the site or you can use Facebook,
Twitter, or Google to log in. I recommend creating a regular, unlinked
account.

The main Excel excel file is the actual HTML scrape for the data I pulled.
It's pretty self explanatory. The documents directory holds all the files. The
filenames match exactly what is in the Excel file except that they are also
prefixed with the unique ID the site assigns for every document to avoid
filename collisions. 200mb unzipped. There are 12 "documents" on that site
that were actually just pages that contain mini-blog entries that are links to
multiple contracts because they are, for example, things like "contracts for
your personal life" and "top legal documents for freelancers". I added "topic,
group, multiple" to the tags and keywords columns in Excel to identify these
items.

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joshontheweb
Bummer. I use their service and would have paid but they never asked. Good
alternatives paid or otherwise?

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artur_makly
damn shame.

