Ask HN: 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.

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.

Maciej is a member here - https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords - maybe he can help you out?

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!

Thanks! I have a suspicion that the issue with my wife's account is caused to the account name (and in particular the fact that it contains a hyphen), as any search throws an error "unknown local index 'blah__blah' in search request", with the account name actually being 'blah-blah'.

Full search text existing archived bookmarks still works fine on my account, but only about 1 in 20 new bookmarks are archiving now.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear that it's still rock solid for you, hopefully it can be for me again.