
Classic Google Sites shutting down by September 2021 - Santosh83
https://support.google.com/a/answer/9958187
======
thed0t
Just 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
I'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.

~~~
nradov
So once again we see that formal Google support channels are worthless, and
the only way to get issues resolved is to complain in public.

~~~
unicornporn
Yes, that's how it works. Strong voice & solid platform equals instant
assistance. Basically an influncer first support system. I don't go near them
anymore.

~~~
atsuzaki
This seems to be a case with a lot of companies, too (not just the giants).
It's such a shame.

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prepend
I 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
I 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.

------
easton
This 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.

~~~
andybak
They 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.

~~~
mattzito
Hi, thanks for the feedback. To be clear, we invested a lot of time and effort
internally trying to find a path forward where we could support hosting the
sites as static dumps and continue serving them. At no point was the cost in
terms of compute/storage/network even a consideration.

In the end, it turned out to be extremely difficult to do as you describe.
First, static sites, for us, aren't really static - there's dynamic content on
a page, there's certain core components that we have to be able to serve, for
example, we have to have a mechanism for people to report abusive sites, have
to have a mechanism to remove those sites, and we also have to have the
ability for users to request the deletion of these sites, and so on.

In the end, it was going to come with a significant amount of engineering cost
to continue to deliver static sites, even with reduced fidelity and a worse
user experience. We felt it was better to be clear with users that we are
going to transition them to the new platform along with providing them with a
backup of their content to insure nothing was lost.

I'll say that the vast majority of current classic sites are extremely old and
inactive, and not receiving any traffic in the last two years (editors or
visitors). In addition, more than 90% of users currently choose new sites when
they are building a site, so we are giving users a long window of notice to
decide how they want to handle their sites, whether active or inactive.

~~~
jotaf
> significant amount of engineering cost to continue to deliver static sites,
> even with reduced fidelity and a worse user experience

A few things to consider:

\- The reputational damage of solidifying the narrative that Google drops
projects without a good reason from the users' point of view.

\- A bare-bones deletion/flagging UI does not seem like a huge undertaking
(though as an engineer I realizing it's not exciting work); working things out
with a non-profit such as the Internet Archive or a museum could be an even
lower-cost solution.

\- 90's websites are also hideous ("worse user experience") by today's
standards, yet they have charm and are a product of their times. I don't think
anyone would argue that they should be deleted on account of that, just like
ancient pottery often has "badly drawn" human figures yet the value is in the
cultural expression. There are digital conservation efforts by museums (e.g.
restoring 80's arcade games); I'm sure that consulting with a digital
conservator would have arrived at a very different treatment of this data.

~~~
john-shaffer
> The reputational damage of solidifying the narrative that Google drops
> projects without a good reason from the users' point of view.

That ship has sailed. Google's reputation for instability can't get any worse.
At this point, it would take a complete 180° and a good 5-10 years of angelic
behavior from Google for me to even consider relying on them in any capacity.

~~~
thaumasiotes
I was going to say the same. The reputational damage is significant if Google
is actively trying to change their reputation, but zero if not.

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mattzito
Hi 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
Hi Matt, What was the rationale for this project? The joy of destruction?

~~~
mattzito
Classic 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.

~~~
msla
> Classic Sites has been around for a very long time (since 2008)

Anything I can say would only detract from this.

This is modern Google.

~~~
gtfoutttt
Amen. 12 years is not long in anyone's eyes except for SV.

~~~
stickfigure
Then should I assume you're reading this on IE7?

------
steelframe
Thanks 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.

------
demadog
Google 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.

------
TheChaplain
I hope the archive.org-team may have a shot at the inactive sites before they
disappear.

------
bliss
Ha, I have a couple, created in 2011 - who knew (well... remembered!) - now
going to archive and delete them

~~~
xen2xen1
Yeah, 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.

------
katsume3
Also relevant: [https://copyblogger.com/digital-
sharecropping/](https://copyblogger.com/digital-sharecropping/)

------
zegl
Surprisingly, 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.

------
mkj
I 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
Classic 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
Correct. 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)

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gundmc
Where 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
The 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)

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easton_s
4 years later and the new sites still doesn't have an API.

