PRACTICE

The accounts are closed: what happened to this community, and what a shutdown notice should tell you

This path served a registration form until about 2010; no accounts exist, no data is held, nothing will be restored, and the windows other services gave their users when they closed are the most useful thing this page can now show.

Published 2026-08-06 · Updated — · 2583 words · 24 sources · Status of facts checked 2026-08-06

Four statements come first, because they are what a visitor arriving at this address is most likely to be looking for.

• From 2007 until about 2010, this path served the account-registration form of a social bookmarking community running on Drupal at this domain. Captures of the form return HTTP 200 from 2007-07-02 to 2012-05-29; from 2013-03-01 the archive’s record of the path is a 404.¹
• That community is closed. There is no account system at this address, no registration, no login, no comments and no user data. This page contains no input elements of any kind — nothing here is a form that has stopped working.
• The domain was acquired at auction on 2026-08-06 by the publisher of this site, which has no connection to the previous operator and holds no copy of the user database, no bookmarks and no email addresses. None of the previous site’s prose and none of its users’ submissions is republished here.
• There is no export to request, and no address that would answer such a request. The only surviving trace of an account is whatever the Internet Archive captured of a public profile page, and for most accounts it captured nothing. The count, and the query that produces it, are below.

That is the whole answer to the question this address is usually asked. The rest of this page is the part that is worth a reader’s time: the closures that came with a notice, how long each notice actually gave, and which of those numbers can be checked in advance.

The route was not a name anyone chose

/user/register is a Drupal default. In Drupal 6’s core user module the menu item user/register is declared with the title “Create new account” and a page callback rendering the user_register form.² Sites built on that release carried the identical path, which is why this address is still cited and still receives requests.

What the captures record is the shape of an account rather than any account’s contents. The capture of 2009-02-12 carries a form with the identifier user-register and fields named name, mail, a captcha solution, an avatar selector, and a profile field named profile_google_adsense_client_id; the capture of 2012-05-29 carries the same form identifier and the same advertising field, plus a timezone field and a profile field named profile_googleplus.¹ A registration form that asks a new member for an advertising publisher identifier is describing the arrangement it was built for, and it dates the artefact more precisely than any adjective would.

What a former member can still recover, counted

The Wayback Machine’s index can be asked directly how much of this community’s member-facing surface survives. The query, run 2026-08-06, was http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=infopirate.org/user/&matchType=prefix&output=json&fl=timestamp,statuscode,original&collapse=urlkey.³ It returns 1,497 distinct URLs beneath /user/. Ninety-four of those are numbered profile paths of the form /user/<number>. Run again without the collapse=urlkey parameter, the same query returns 3,613 capture records, and 79 of the ninety-four numbered paths have at least one capture that returned 200.

The highest number appearing is /user/6021. In Drupal 6 the user identifier is a serial column in the users table, allocated in sequence as accounts are created,⁴ so 6021 is a floor under the number of accounts the site created and is not a count of accounts that existed at any moment. Measured against that floor, the archive holds a captured public profile page for 79 of them: about 1.3 per cent. The remaining registrations left no member-facing page in the public record at all.

A capture of one such path, taken 2012-05-11, carries the account name as the page title, an avatar image, and sections headed History and Referrals.⁵ No account’s saved links are reproduced here, and none will be. The general point holds beyond this domain: a captured profile is a rendering of what a theme printed on the day a crawler passed, not an export. It carries no guarantee that the links it shows were the whole collection.

Nine endings, and the window each one gave

Every date below comes from a named source; where no date could be found, the cell reads could not be verified. Two intervals are computed from those dates: the days from the first public notice to the day the service stopped, and the days from that notice to the last moment data could still be downloaded. The second is the number that decides what a user keeps.^a

Sources, row by row: Ma.gnolia⁶⁷; My Web⁸; Furl⁹; Google Reader¹⁰¹¹¹²; Delicious¹³; StumbleUpon¹⁴¹⁵; CiteULike¹⁶; Omnivore¹⁷¹⁸; Pocket¹⁹.

Three findings come out of the table, and none of them is the one the phrase “how much notice did they give” implies.

The notice period and the export period are different numbers, set independently. Google Reader ran 110 days from announcement to shutdown and kept Takeout exports alive a further fourteen. Pocket ran 47 days to the shutdown and then kept exports open 92 days more, so a user who missed the shutdown still had three months. Omnivore collapsed both into one date: the announcement of 2024-10-29 stated that information could be exported through 2024-11-15, after which it would be deleted, and a capture of that announcement taken 2024-11-20 still gave 2024-11-15.¹⁷ An extension of that window to 2024-11-30 circulates in secondary write-ups; it could not be verified against the announcement itself.^b

There are three outcomes, not one. Data was migrated into another service (Furl into Diigo on 2009-04-17, StumbleUpon accounts into Mix on 2018-06-30), deleted after a stated window (Google Reader, Omnivore, Pocket), or left in place with the service frozen (Delicious, read-only from 2017-06-15, with the acquirer stating there was no time pressure to migrate). The useful question about a service in use is which of the three its operator would be capable of.

Length of notice does not predict what users kept. Ma.gnolia’s members had no window at all, and what people recovered afterwards came from third-party caches and feeds rather than from the service. Furl’s users had no published window either and lost nothing to the shutdown, because a buyer moved the records. Delicious has been read-only for nine years with no deadline announced, checked 2026-08-06. The variable that decided each case was whether a copy existed outside the service on the day it failed.

What a shutdown notice should tell you

Read against the table, an adequate notice is a short specification that can be graded. Five items.

• The date the service stops accepting new data, as a date and not a season. Eight of the nine rows carry a day; CiteULike’s carries a month, and the day is disputed between two sources.
• The date the export stops working, stated separately. Pocket separated the two by 92 days, Google Reader by fourteen, Omnivore by none. A notice giving only a shutdown date is telling a user the export dies with it.
• The fields the export contains. A notice that names no fields leaves the user to discover after the deadline that highlights, notes, read state or timestamps were not in the file.
• Whether data is deleted, and when. “Deleted after 2025-10-08” and “read-only, no deletion” are different promises with different consequences, and either beats silence.
• Whether a migration target exists, and whether it is opt-in. Furl and StumbleUpon moved records into another service; Omnivore offered a destination and deleted what was not moved.

No notice among the nine, as recorded by the sources cited here, published all five items as a single dated block. That is a standard about documents, not about operators.

The checks that run before any notice arrives

The following are checks against published records, run on services a reader already uses. Status figures are stated with the date they were checked, 2026-08-06; none of them requires access to an operator’s internal information.

The registry record. Every domain publishes an expiry date and it is free to read. The registry RDAP record for pinboard.in, queried 2026-08-06, carries a registration event of 2009-06-15, an expiration of 2027-06-15 and a last-changed event of 2026-07-30; the record does not state what changed.²⁰ On 2026-06-15 pinboard.in stopped resolving. The operator, posting as idlewords on Hacker News the same day, wrote that the domain had been set to auto-renew, that something went wrong, and that no registrar email reached him; a commenter in the same thread reported the server still answering on its IP address.²¹ pinboard.in returns HTTP 200, checked 2026-08-06. The incident is not the point: the date at which any service’s address stops resolving is published in advance, in a machine-readable record, and almost nobody reads it.

Release and commit cadence, where the software is public. GitHub’s repository metadata, retrieved 2026-08-06, records linkding’s most recent push as 2026-08-06 and Karakeep’s most recent release as v0.33.1, published 2026-08-01.²²²³ A repository is evidence about code and nothing else: it says nothing about a hosted service’s billing, its domain registration or its owner’s plans.

Whether the export returns a file. This is the only check that tests the thing a user needs, and the one nobody performs until a notice arrives. An export never produced is a restore never tested — the arrangement that ended Ma.gnolia, where a file sync existed, had no integrity checking and no versioning, and had never been used to restore anything.⁶

Registration and read-only states. A service that closes signups, goes invitation-only or freezes writes has already published something about its position. As of 2026-08-06 the blogmarks.net homepage states that the service is being relaunched with invitation-only signups and that the public version is temporarily inaccessible.²⁴ Delicious went read-only on 2017-06-15 and has stayed there.

Whether answering is the same as operating. citeulike.org returns a homepage as of 2026-08-06 and the service ceased in March 2019.¹⁶ Any check that reads HTTP 200 as health scores a frozen page as an operating one.

These checks share a limit worth stating plainly: they tell a reader when to take an export, not what to think of an operator. A lapsed registration is a date, not a verdict; a quiet month in a repository is a date, not a verdict. The only action any of them supports is holding a copy that survives whatever the answer turns out to be.

Which is what this address is now a record of. An account is a tenancy. The community that stood here allocated account identifiers as high as 6021, left no shutdown notice in the archive record consulted here, and survives as 79 captured profile pages in a third-party archive. This is what a tenancy looks like after the landlord leaves.

References

1. Internet Archive. “Wayback CDX Server API response for infopirate.org/user/register.” Internet Archive, n.d. http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=infopirate.org/user/register&output=json&fl=timestamp,statuscode,original — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
2. Drupal core contributors. “user.module, Drupal 6.x branch.” Drupal code repository, n.d. https://git.drupalcode.org/project/drupal/-/blob/6.x/modules/user/user.module — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
3. Internet Archive. “Wayback CDX Server API response for the infopirate.org/user/ prefix.” Internet Archive, n.d. http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=infopirate.org/user/&matchType=prefix&output=json&fl=timestamp,statuscode,original&collapse=urlkey — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
4. Drupal core contributors. “user.install, Drupal 6.x branch.” Drupal code repository, n.d. https://git.drupalcode.org/project/drupal/-/blob/6.x/modules/user/user.install — retrieved 2026-08-06. Cited for the users.uid serial column. ↩
5. Internet Archive. “Wayback capture of a numbered profile path at infopirate.org, timestamp 20120511162004.” Internet Archive, 2012-05-11. https://web.archive.org/web/20120511162004/http://infopirate.org/user/5630 — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
6. Budman, Gleb. “Ma.gnolia Wilts with No Backup.” Backblaze Blog, 2009-03-02. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/magnolia-wilts-with-no-backup/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
7. Wikipedia contributors. “Gnolia.” Wikipedia, n.d. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnolia — retrieved 2026-08-06. Cited as a secondary source; Ma.gnolia redirects to this title. ↩
8. Wikipedia contributors. “My Web.” Wikipedia, n.d. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Web — retrieved 2026-08-06. Cited as a secondary source. ↩
9. Wikipedia contributors. “Furl.” Wikipedia, n.d. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furl — retrieved 2026-08-06. Cited as a secondary source. ↩
10. Sullivan, Danny. “Google To Close Google Reader On July 1.” MarTech, 2013-03-13. https://martech.org/google-to-close-google-reader/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
11. Google Reader team. “A final farewell.” Official Google Reader Blog, 2013-07-02. https://googlereader.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-final-farewell.html — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
12. Archive Team. “Google Reader.” Archive Team wiki, n.d. https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Google_Reader — retrieved 2026-08-06. Cited for its quotation of Google’s Reader shutdown FAQ on the Takeout deadline. ↩
13. Cegłowski, Maciej. “Pinboard Acquires Delicious.” Pinboard Blog, 2017-06-01. https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
14. Heater, Brian. “So long, StumbleUpon.” TechCrunch, 2018-05-24. https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/24/so-long-stumbleupon/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
15. Wikipedia contributors. “StumbleUpon.” Wikipedia, n.d. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon — retrieved 2026-08-06. Cited as a secondary source. ↩
16. Wikipedia contributors. “CiteULike.” Wikipedia, n.d. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CiteULike — retrieved 2026-08-06. Cited as a secondary source; the closure date is disputed. ↩
17. Omnivore. “Omnivore is joining ElevenLabs.” Omnivore Blog, 2024-10-29. https://web.archive.org/web/20241120203753/https://blog.omnivore.app/p/omnivore-is-joining-elevenlabs — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
18. Sokolov, Daniel AJ. “Later reading app Omnivore closes down.” heise online, 2024-10-29. https://www.heise.de/en/news/Later-reading-app-Omnivore-closes-down-9998733.html — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
19. Mendes, Marcus. “Mozilla announces shutdown of Pocket as it refocuses on Firefox.” 9to5Mac, 2025-05-22. https://9to5mac.com/2025/05/22/mozilla-announces-shutdown-of-pocket/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
20. .in registry. “RDAP record for pinboard.in.” rdap.nixiregistry.in, n.d. https://rdap.nixiregistry.in/rdap/domain/pinboard.in — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
21. Hacker News. “Pinboard’s DNS registration has expired.” Hacker News item 48540592, 2026-06-15. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48540592 — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
22. GitHub. “sissbruecker/linkding repository metadata.” GitHub REST API, n.d. https://api.github.com/repos/sissbruecker/linkding — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
23. GitHub. “karakeep-app/karakeep release metadata.” GitHub REST API, n.d. https://api.github.com/repos/karakeep-app/karakeep/releases — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
24. blogmarks.net. “blogmarks.net homepage.” blogmarks.net, n.d. http://blogmarks.net/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩

Notes

1. The two computed intervals are calendar-day differences between published dates and ignore time of day. Where a source gives only a month, the row states a range spanning the first and last day of that month rather than a single figure. ↩
2. An extension of Omnivore’s download window to 2024-11-30 appears in secondary write-ups. The announcement as captured on 2024-11-20, three weeks after publication and five days after the stated deadline, still carried 2024-11-15, so the extension could not be verified from the operator’s own text and is not used in the table. ↩

From 2007 to about 2010 this address served the account-registration form of a Drupal social bookmarking community that also carried user blogs and a Windows and Mac troubleshooting stream; the form asked new members for an advertising publisher identifier alongside the usual name and mail fields. Captures of the path return 200 from 2007-07-02 to 2012-05-29, and the archive records a 404 here from 2013-03-01 onward. An archived page at arsiv.pilli.com still points at this address (checked 2026-08-06).