HACKER Q&A
📣 tsg

What Happened to Pinboard?


I know there have been threads like this in the past about sporadic difficulties, but from my own experience and complaints here and on twitter, I'm wondering if pinboard.in's paid archiving service is broken, and if there is any chance of a fix; and if not, what people have moved on to as an alternative.

For the last 4 months, my paid archiving account has almost completely stopped archiving bookmarks. I tried setting up another account as a trial, and that had the same problem. Worse, my wife made an account last summer, and the full text search of her bookmarks has never worked at all (it throws up an error message).

I've sent several emails to Maciej over the last few months without any replies (apart from one email cancelling the extra account I'd set up, so I know my emails are received).

This is a really frustrating experience! I've been really happy with Pinboard for many years, and paid up front for several years of archiving. There is also now a wonderful MacOS/iOS client ("Pins for Pinboard").

I feel bad posting a thread here, but it seems to be impossible to contact support, and I hope that there are still other Pinboard users (and perhaps even Maciej) here who might have more of an idea what's going on (e.g. whether this is affecting all accounts).

I would really love to be able to carry on using Pinboard, but I have no idea whether to expect it to ever start working again.

  👤 tptacek Accepted Answer ✓
Huh, weird. Archiving is working reliably for me, and I just tested full-text search against recently archived PDFs, and it too is working. Just a data point!

It's one of the annoying things about running (or being a customer of) a SAAS company, is that if something is wrong with someone's account, it can look like the whole world is broken --- but it might just be broken for some weird, unpredictable-but-deterministic subset of accounts.

(Or maybe it's only working for some weird, unpredictable-but-deterministic subset of accounts).

Good luck! I love Pinboard too.

👤 chinathrow
His blog is down and he is on a year long Twitter leave.

"Alright, I'm going to take a year off the twitters and see what else I can do with the time."

http://blog.pinboard.in/ https://twitter.com/Pinboard/

👤 idlewords
Hey, thanks for posting this.

Archiving (mis)behavior depends on what machine your account is assigned to, which is why people have dissimilar experiences.

I went off and did some stuff unrelated to the site, and now it's time to pay (or refund!) the piper. I'm sorry it was so difficult to get my attention for a customer service problem!

👤 asdefghyk
As there has been no response from support to several email requests, I have stopped using Pinboard. I am temporarily Using Ditto ( a clipboard manager ) to store links and other interesting text snippets and pictures etc. ( I've decided that any tool I use needs to allow a local backup easily and preferable automatically ) I also use browser extension "Single File" on Chrome and Firefox to automatically save web pages locally. Tabs Outliner on Chrome is excellent in my opinion. Also use Program Automatic Screenshotter SO I have utely no evidence of that )several ways to determine browsing history. ( I assumed the Pinboard owner has lost interest somewhat - but I have absolutely no evidence of that )
👤 _corvo_
I’ve had similar issue for some time. I had not used Pinboard regularly for a couple of years but was still paying for archiving. I started using the account a couple of months back actively and most of the bookmarks aren’t being archived. There’s one that’ll go once in a while, so feature doesn’t seem to be fully broken but yes, when I restarted using Pinboard, ~96% of my bookmarks were archived. Now it’s down to 90%. Last one went through 27 days ago.

Also emailed support email, crickets!

👤 kirubakaran
Since you asked about alternatives, you might be interested in trying my https://histre.com/

It is fast. It gives you bookmarks with notes, highlights, collections, publishing, and sharing. The browser extensions are open source. I’ve described additional features here: https://histre.com/features/

There is full api access and several integrations including Hacker News https://histre.com/integrations/ Your HN upvotes become bookmarks and you can share them if you want. I've published by Hacker News upvotes here https://histre.com/public/notebooks/o34gelgt/kirubakarans-ha... via Histre integration :-)

IFTTT integration lets you connect Histre to thousands of sources: https://ifttt.com/histre Zapier integration will go live in a week or so. Archiving and full text search will go live this month.

I'm building recommendations. The unique thing about these recommendations is that there is no conflict of interest like with Google, Amazon etc where they try to push their own agenda. These recommendations just work for you.

The "business model" is a simple $5/month with a liberal free plan. That's it.

You can import your Pinboard data into Histre to give it a try https://histre.com/integrations/pinboard/

👤 Arubis
This sounds frustrating, and it's strange that adding new accounts hasn't changed anything, but FWIW my (positively ancient, rate-grandfathered but with archiving activated later) Pinboard account continues to function as expected. n=1, etc.

I previously have had success DM'ing @Pinboard with a turnaround time of a couple days.

👤 doomrobo
Same issue. I contacted support and literally never got a response. Cancelled my subscription. Now I use Zotero and it's pretty good
👤 tedmiston
I don't use the archiving feature, but it might be useful to post some of the URLs here that are failing to archive.

I remember seeing in the FAQ [1] that pages above 32 MB won't be archived. That's not much with how bloated pages are these days. I wonder if the page + assets is exceeding that limit?

> Is there a size limit on archived links?

> There is a 32 MB size limit per link, which is typically enough for all but the largest pages. Links larger than 32 MB may not be archived.

As an alternative, ArchiveBox [2] has Pinboard support.

[1]: https://www.pinboard.in/faq/#archiving

[2]: https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox

👤 alexpotato
Been a LONG time happy user of Pinboard.

I was looking to make automated backups of my bookmarks (not the archive) and I realized that the below (with your own values for the cookies) is a quick and easy way to pull down a json of all of your entries:

   curl --cookie "s_fid=; auth=; secauth=; login=alexpotato" https://pinboard.in/export/format:json/ -o pinboard.$(date -I).json
👤 firebones
What you are all witnessing is that the proverbial bus hit. (Was there a proverb about busses?)

This is just a drill. Only a drill. Use your backups.

👤 Fire-Dragon-DoL
I subscribed roughly one year ago and asked for a refund within the first month (I think it was a month) because I decided to go with raindrop.io instead. Even though the website stated I would get a refund, the email was ignored.

This story suggests this problem is ongoing.

👤 l0b0 

  > You asked to download your archive on 2022-03-10 22:33:57.
UTC, I think. It's been a couple hours; let's see if there's a link. My archive is almost 50 GB, but that's not been a problem yet.
👤 paulhart
Maciej is a member here - https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords - maybe he can help you out?
👤 anotherhue
I hope he's okay!
👤 asdefghyk
My archiving still works . However, I am unable to get ANY response from support. Have sent several emails. I have made plans to leave.
👤 asdefghyk
Maybe the broken arching happens with LARGE numbers of archive bookmarks? How many bookmarks do people have ?
👤 Arubis
Tangential: for those of us _not_ running into functional issues with Pinboard, [Paperback](https://readpaperback.com) remains one of my favorite addon services for a SaaS pretty much ever. One-time payment unlocks ad-free Instapaper-like functionality driven from your Pinboard account. Superb. (Unaffiliated, happy customer.)