Retiring Bugdar

Bugdar 1.0 was released more than 20 years ago, and today I am officially announcing its retirement.

At its peak in the mid-2010s, Bugdar had a few thousand installs. But today I think the sole remaining instance is here on Blue Static. It has been well over a decade since any major change to the product has occurred. As I’ve written about previously, my available free time has shrunk and my interests have shifted. The prospect of improving Bugdar, a PHP4/5-era codebase clocking in at roughly 28,000 lines without a single unit test, is both daunting and unexciting.

What held back this retirement is a palatable alternative issue tracker for the projects I continue to maintain. With the arrival of Codeberg, a nonprofit committed to open source, there is now a platform on which I want to host Blue Static open source projects. Canonical git repositories will always exist on src.bluestatic.org, but issue tracking and collaboration will move to Codeberg.

As of today, Bugdar on Blue Static no longer accepts registrations. (The number of spam registrations that even get past reCAPTCHA was a strong motivating factor for this change.) I will be archiving the bug database as static HTML and moving any relevant open issues to the new tracker.

So, cheers to Bugdar! First commit in CVS 2003, migrated to SVN in 2004, and finally to git in 2008.