Sunsetting Horaro

TL;DR

Starting 2026, horaro.org will be made read-only. It will still be up and serve the existing data, but no new schedules will be able to be created.
I encourage my visitors to migrate to more maintained installations of Horaro, for example horaro.net.

Background

A bit over 10 years ago, I launched Horaro with pretty much one simple goal: to allow everyone to make simple, lean schedules for their speedrunning events. At that time even taking the viewer's timezone into account was a novelty.

Since then many, many more people have used Horaro for their own events. Everytime I checked the calendar and saw five+ events every single week, I was blown away by the response. Today Horaro has been used to host over 4,000 events with over 6,000 schedules. Incredible for a website with zero advertising. :-)
Even more amazing: all of this with zero moderation and pretty much zero spam. For some reason everyone seems to have decided to use this site responsibly and I am very, very thankful for that.

As many of you have probably noticed, development on Horaro has stopped a few years ago. I personally have left the speedrunning community and moved on to other hobbies. My last remaining task is to mirror the AGDQ/SDGQ schedules and even then, I often have to be reminded by kind people via e-mail whenever a new GDQ is coming up.

Since Horaro uses very little resources and was developed from day one to be very cacheable, it was basically free to keep it running on my private server (besides the costs for the domain).
I have never asked for nor received any money for providing horaro.org. Money always creates expectations and I never wanted to feel like I owe anyone anything or feel obliged to fix a bug.

Why end it?

I neglected Horaro so much, I never even noticed people creating issues and submitting pull requests on GitHub. This signals to me that there is still interest in Horaro, but also that I am not the right person to keep the project going.
Since 2014, I have moved on from the PHP/MySQL software stack (not because it's bad, but my interests are simply in other regions where PHP is not the right tool for the job) and am mostly unwilling to go back. Even worse: While the PHP code is pretty clean and modern, rejuvenating the JavaScript and CSS is beyond my skillset. And unlike to PHP, I strongly dislike modern web technologies.

At this point, I feel like I am standing in the way of other people picking up my project and doing cool things with it. And that's not how I want Horaro to end.

Horaro's Future

Over the last few weeks I talked with the maintainer of oengus.io about a potential future for Horaro. I am glad they want to develop Horaro further while also keeping its spirit alive.

To keep friction to a minimum and allow an orderly migration, we have decided on the following plan:

  • A new Horaro, under a new domain at horaro.net, will be set up. This is where the future development will happen.
  • To make it possible to have a cut-off point, I will make horaro.org read-only by the end of 2025. All existing events and schedules will continue to work for at least a year more, to give active communities time to migrate.
  • Once horaro.org is made read-only, a full database dump of all events and schedules will be made available for download. This dump of course won't contain passwords or any other sensitive data.
    Horaro is meant to make data available and so I do not want to take it silently into the grave with it. The database dump will be available free of charge: money was never involved in Horaro and I am not in the business of selling data now.
    If you do not want your events/schedules to be exported, you can log-in before 2026 and set a secret for your schedules. I would kindly ask you not to make previously public schedules suddenly private, but the choice is yours.
  • Sometime in 2027 the horaro.org domain might also be handed over to the new maintainers of horaro.net. That is not yet decided.

Thank You

As I already mentioned, I am truly grateful to have such a well-behaved userbase. You all make me believe that niche communities can still work on the Internet. Thank you all for having made Horaro into what some consider a staple of the community.

If you have any further questions, you can reach me at sgt@kabukiman.org.

— Christoph (Sgt. Kabukiman)