MathB.in, a website for sharing snippets of mathematical text with others on the web and a Pastebin for mathematics is shutting down soon. This information has shared by website founder, Susuam Pal in an official blog post.
The website was formed on Sunday, March 25, 2012 , but now Susan has decided to shut it down as he was not able to handle spammy and infringing content posted on his website. And he was regularly getting notices of infringement from law enforcement companies.
He has not revealed any specific date for shut down but it will happen in a few months. Before the shut this down, he will archive all non-secret and non-spam posts at github.com/mathbin/mathbin-content-archive.
He might share more updates on the shutdown and archival later on my Twitter stream at @susam. The source code for this website is open source and is available at github.com/mathbin/mathbin-source-archive.
Have a look at official blog post down below.
It was about 8 years ago when I sat down on a Saturday night and began writing MathB.in. After close to 8 hours of coding through the night, the website was ready in the morning. I published the website in the morning of Sunday, March 25, 2012 and shared it with a few of my friends who loved mathematics. My friends and I used to discuss a lot of interesting mathematics problems back then and this website became a way to share some snippets of mathematics with each other. My friends shared the website with their friends, then those friends shared it with theirs, and the usage of the website grew. One day, I announced this website on the MathJax mailing list and the usage grew even further. Within a year, the website had users from various parts of the world. It was fun to watch the usage grow.
The world has changed a lot since then. The Internet has changed a lot since then. I have changed a lot since then. Spam continues to increase. It has become increasingly difficult for me to keep a website like this running independently with a single-person effort. In these 8 years, I have been served with law enforcement notices when someone posted unlawful content on the website. Everytime, my servers would be shut down and I would have to boot my servers in rescue mode to remove the offending content before it could come back online again. Since then, every few weeks I have tried to review the incoming spam and delete them as much as possible. The appreciation and good feedback I received from many happy users kept me going. A truly robust solution would require more development work on this website, that I cannot afford at this stage of my life.
What was once a joy to work on has now become stressful. I have a full-time job. My responsibilities have grown. More importantly, I would rather work on other things. I cannot maintain this website anymore. I have considered shutting down this website several times in the past. When another of my domain, susam.in, where I used to host my personal blog (archive) was seized and transferred to a law enforcement organization without any notification or authorization, it was the last straw. I do not wish to spend my weekends worrying about spam and unlawful content. I do not wish to maintain constant vigilance on my online servers to maintain ownership. It consumes time, more time than I can afford.
I understand that spam, malware, etc. are here to stay. I also understand that organizations devoted to keeping the Internet clean have a job to do. I respect their efforts. However, it has begun to take a toll on me. I have decided to move on from this project.
For those of you who have used this website, I thank you. Running this project that could serve you in a meaningful way gave me a sense of accomplishment and pride. For those of you who are disappointed that this website is going away, I am sorry. I wish I could continue to put the time and effort necessary in maintaining and developing this website but I have to acknowledge my limitations and disengage myself from this project which is an artifact of my past, not my present. Hopefully, this decision will allow me to work on other interesting projects.
I am going to shutdown this website after a few months. I won’t commit to a specific date for shutdown at this time. Before I shut this down, I will archive all non-secret and non-spam posts at github.com/mathbin/mathbin-content-archive. I might share more updates on the shutdown and archival later on my Twitter stream at @susam.
The source code for this website is open source and is available at github.com/mathbin/mathbin-source-archive. You could use this source code and run your own MathBin but I think you would be much better off writing your own code to create a new MathBin. I wrote this code a long time ago and I am not proud of its quality anymore. You might be able to write something much better with a little effort. 🙂
Finally, I hope you’ll keep no hard feelings towards me. If you have liked using MathB.in, I would love to stay in touch with you on Twitter. My Twitter handle is @susam. See you there!
