The open source DOCX editor submitted to HN a few weeks ago has been deleted

6 days ago

The github repo under eigenpal is gone. The web site at docx-editor is 503. No idea what's going on.

62 comments

gcanyon

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anenefan  6 days ago

This link should be enough to work out the relevant links. [1]

I would guess that they have lost access to a resource lately ... I've read there's a lot of that going around atm.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=thisisjedr

  • refulgentis  6 days ago

    I clicked through and browsed the comments and clicked links. It does appear the links are not working as described. Is there something you’re throwing and I’m not catching? :)

    • anenefan  6 days ago

      The relevant non functional links should be listed in the comments. The OP was complaining they were not able to include links directly. I'm not sure about [1] [2] [3] in the main post but the show hn [A] or [B] thread should afaik have not been an issue.

      [A] https://github.com/eigenpal/docx-editor

      Edit for additional show hn thread

      1 reply →

nathanstitt  6 days ago

Also not affiliated but my open-source tinycld uses docx as the backend storage for its text package. Supports _most_ of the features (including comments and suggestions) but is still very young. It has a golang backend that reads/writes docx and translates to YJS that the editor reads for multi-user access. Has web/iOS/Android support.

I found docx to be a very well documented format and a surprisingly good fit for this.

https://tinycld.org has a live demo

  • coryrc  6 days ago

    I went looking around, but I couldn't find why you're making tinycld, and whether I could expect it to keep going as a project in the future.

    I expect I could find whether you're using hardened server implementations or reimplementing, but if it's the former, you should advertise that, or if the latter, you shouldn't.

    • nathanstitt  6 days ago

      It's pretty simple: I have a small company and we're using it internally. my hope by releasing it is that the ecosystem will grow and it'll become the best way to publish web apps (ambitious I know).

      I do not know what you expect by "hardened server implementations", it's open-source and people will probably host it a lot of different ways? If you're talking about the various services it offers like imap/webdav, I'm using well established golang libraries which I hope are secure but I have not performed a security audit or anything like that.

      2 replies →

darkteflon  6 days ago

Oh man, that’s disappointing. We implemented this in a test environment and have been hammering on it. Would love to know what’s going on as it solves a real pain point for us.

  • d3Xt3r  6 days ago

    There's plenty of open-source docx editors though? What makes eigenpal's editor so special?

    • darkteflon  6 days ago

      Could you recommend your picks in the space?

      Edit (since I can’t seem to reply directly) - to the commenter suggesting LibreOffice below: quite different things. This was a library for implementing reasonably high fidelity docx viewing / editing in the browser.

      3 replies →

  • gcanyon  6 days ago

    I’m in exactly the same boat. I’ll have to look at some of the suggestions here

hypercain  6 days ago

[flagged]

  • mindcrime  6 days ago

    Nothing weird about it. The HN guidelines[1] make it clear, IMO, that while some self-promotion is fine, the intent here is NOT to use the site primarily (or exclusively) for self-promotion. The account that submitted the userplane.io link had only ever submitted two links, and both were to userplane.io. What do you expect to happen?

    Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

    > After a few more experiences like that, I've mostly stopped posting because it doesn't feel like the effort is worth it

    Ironically this is exactly the wrong response. You should post more, but more stuff that's simply intellectually interesting, and not just to promote your own stuff. But if your only reason for being here is self-promotion, then you're right... not worth it. shrug

    [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

  • altairprime  6 days ago

    Your account was created 5 hours ago, and you’ve already had two Show HNs flagged? That’s ‘email the site mods and ask for participation guidance’ territory. Perhaps you posted them under an account that wasn’t participating otherwise on the site and/or was named after a business rather than a person? In any case, bad form to re-promote your projects in an unrelated new post rather than reaching out to the mods. Adapt your behavior to be 95% contributions of posts and comments that are unrelated to your own projects/investments or else you’ll continue seeing hostility and flags to your work.

rolph  6 days ago

it is forseeable that MS would be very interested in taking a security stance vs a very possible vector.

  • conartist6  6 days ago

    I was going to guess that they accused the author of copying code from Office. Was AI used in the project? Perhaps a model regurgitated copyrighted code leading to a sternly worded notice from legal...?

    • conartist6  6 days ago

      Ooooh yeah. Looking through the author's past posts: "got a lot of skepticism because we're developing heavily with AI"

      So AI was in use. Then the author says that following the spec alone wasn't enough to get it working, they got "active community feedback" and fed that feedback into the AI until it worked just like Word. I have to think that if there were ANY conditions under which a model might output code that Microsoft legal would threaten to sue you for, these would be them