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Comment by danielbarla | Hacker News Reader

Regarding the notice period - it's actually quite interesting, I mean, how were the customers / users notified? I think there was a notice on the website, but it's not like people are going to be checking there very frequently.

In my case, I was actually using Telize for the Geo IP lookup for some non mission critical stuff which only ran on-demand. I actually only noticed it was offline in mid-December when I wanted to use it. It took a few minutes to read the notice, and another 5 to find a similar free provider and parse their JSON. But the point remains; I don't think most people were aware of the impending shut down until it happened. Perhaps switching it off for a day or two then back on again would have got more people no notice. Either way, it was a free service, so I guess you can't complain much.

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I wonder if anyone has proposed a new 4xx error code for the HTTP standard that's something like "Deprecated?" Sort of like 410/Gone but actually meaning "going away soon?" You could continue to return valid content in the response body but any sane client would also notice the 4xx and choke on it.

As a consumer of the API I could then (temporarily) ignore those errors and keep using the message body while I make plans to get off the platform.

EDIT: How does one go about proposing a new HTTP status code, anyway?

Or just set a date and start rejecting 1% of all requests on that date, 2% the next day, etc. Software that retries immediately will get slower and slower, which will hopefully cause someone to investigate before bandwidth costs become ridiculous. Even if it doesn't help the API users to notice it, you can estimate better what it will do when you turn it off for 100% of the requests.

An API failing intermittently like that would be a nightmare for anyone trying to debug the situation.

You check the website to find out if they are having server problems and you see they have deprecated the API. Problem solved.

(Replying to my own comment)

Looks like you submit proposals here: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/documents/ I'll lurk a while and learn the culture before entertaining submitting a proposal. ^_^

That's the thing isn't it. Obviously you can serve extra "note: 'service is about to shutdown'" in your JSON, but since it's an API a lot of people aren't going to be seeing it. I guess best option would have been to collect everyone's email addresses using the service and email them, but it might have been flagged as spam.

Imo two weeks is plenty of time since you probably shouldn't be using free services like this in any actual product (or at least not without a backup or at very least proper logging)

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