
JQuery plugins site accidentally deleted - last backup one year old. - philjackson
http://blog.jquery.com/2011/12/08/what-is-happening-to-the-jquery-plugins-site/#pluginstldr
======
jasonkester
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.

~~~
rufugee
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
(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!

~~~
donw
Another vote for DataTables here, as it's made the current project I'm working
on possible.

One question -- why Hungarian notation for all the API bits?

~~~
theallan
Legacy basically... When I wrote the first version of DataTables the company I
was working fir then had strict coding standards that required the use of
Hungarian notation, so I was "trained" in at at the time, and I've never
wanted to break compatibility with old versions. v2 might see a clean break
though (whenever I get the time to do that :-) ).

~~~
jtchang
I love DataTables.

Don't bother breaking compatibility with old versions.

You want to know something that is 100x better? This exact comment on your FAQ
page. More people will read it, understand you made that decision, and move
on.

If someone cares enough they will fork it and change the variable names. But
in reality it doesn't matter.

~~~
theallan
Awesome - thank you. I think I will do exactly that.

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betageek
"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
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...

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terhechte
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
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
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.

------
oliveoil
_We are very sorry, but also very excited!_

Damage controlling like a ninja.

~~~
ricardobeat
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _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
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
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.

------
nitrogen
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
hell-banned: <http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=badger7>

------
iclelland
So, is this the real story behind this post?
<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."

------
Maxious
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
Yep, I expected the chaos during that discussion. Nowadays, jQuery world is
getting weird

------
nhebb
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).

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sneak
"And nothing of value was lost."

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

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

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moe
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?

------
dhruvbird
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.

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

------
Pawka
I think this was planned.

------
xxiao
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.

~~~
evilduck
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.

------
ergo14
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
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
>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
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
> 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)

~~~
ergo14
you took random parts of my bigger statement and try to prove your point. Keep
your silly accusation of "hate" to yourself. And no - not everyone does like
you do, it takes someone very arrogant or just young and naive to assume "that
others do as i do". Hey i always make backups - hence what happned with them
never took place (you see how stupid this logic is) - and yes i agree you do
not understand what i wrote, maybe you will one day. For now i dont feel like
discussing this further with someone who makes his own conclusions, puts them
in my mouth and acts like i said something offending. so EOT from me

PS. Read my first comment two or three times IN FULL. Then maybe you will get
the message i tried to carry over. Reading text with understanding is a very
valued skill.

~~~
drivebyacct2
You're kind of being a jackass. You point blank used this scenario to dog on
jQuery and say you would "never touch it" and went so far as to say you'd use
a more robust one. You're really going to act like I'm mischaracterizing what
you said?

And you're really going to tell me I'm being "young and naive" because I
expect that others probably watch out for whether they're using a maintained
project or abandonware?

You need to lose the attitude. I didn't even downvote your comments but I wish
I could downvote this last one. Probably the rudest reply I've ever received
here. It's not as if you're new here. I keep coming back to this and reading
it in shock. I can't believe you're being this delusional, accusatory and flat
out rude towards me. Someone pissed in your Post Toasties this morning.

I don't even have a point I'm trying to prove here. I couldn't care less if
you like/use or dislike/avoid jQuery.

~~~
ergo14
OK i'll try to explain this as clearly(and politely) as i can:

> This is the reason i'm not touching jquery

I'm using something else because of external plugin situation for jquery in
general.

> everything beyond jquery and jqueryUI

Where do i attack jquery project? "You point blank used this scenario to dog "
WHERE ?

> should be untrusted to a degree.

It means you should be extra careful what third party code (beyond jquery
maintained projects) you choose.

> "went so far as to say you'd use a more robust one."

Oh so now it's in bad tone to provide alternatives to your favourite
framework? Seriously we are not supposed to speak of other software here?

> "You're really going to act like I'm mischaracterizing what you said"

Yes, seriously in my eyes you do exactly that - that's why you got harsh
replies. I might have to live with jackass tag, but It is my right to not
agree to change my words to something else.

Can we move to something else, it's not like we are contributing to topic
anymore.

~~~
drivebyacct2
I already quoted you on these points. Direct quotes. That don't change their
meanings even in context.

>Can we move to something else, it's not like we are contributing to topic
anymore.

Thanks White Knight. You're the champion of usefulness in this thread.

