Tindie maintenance

[Mark T]

Tindie has been showing Maintenance underway for at least a week, does anyone using it for selling have any update on whats happening?

[Richard Deane]

Google search shows a lot of user heartache and sensible bitching about bad IT practices. It should have been  a flip over to new system or backout. Weekend at max. 

They never sensibly responded to user requests for VAT/GST/MWT  (sales tax -ish for international users) .

.

My supposition is that they are overstretched and with tariffs etc going belly up. One can hope they survive and improve.

Richard

On Tue, 21 Apr 2026 at 20:09, Mark T <mark...@gmail.com> wrote:

Tindie has been showing Maintenance underway for at least a week, does anyone using it for selling have any update on whats happening?

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[Bill McMullen]

I've been selling on Tindie for about five years now and have received absolutely *ZERO* correspondence from them about this outage.  I know there is at least one outstanding purchaser of my products who has likely paid for the items but I can't access that order and/or the shipping details.  Even if I had that info, there is still the issue that I couldn't receive payment until I could access the website to report the actual shipment and request payment.

An absolute mess with a disastrous response!

I was disappointed when Tindie couldn't deal with the EU VAT changes, let alone provide any options or guidance for foreign sellers dealing with USA purchasers and the new tariffs.  Since Siemes bought Supplyframe (including Tindie & Hackaday) in 2021 for $700M, there really doesn't appear to have been any notable changes or enhancements to the Tindie site.  The longer this outage goes on, the more likely that sellers will be moving to other more reliable platforms that also assist with the practical issues that sellers face.  I know that I will be winding down my involvement with Tindie.

[Steve Cousins]

I agree. I've been trading on Tindie for about 8 years and find the service lacking.

I received no warning of this supposed "scheduled maintenance". It looks more like a major system failure than "scheduled maintenance"

Tindie's failure to implement EU VAT collection (which I thought was a legal requirement for online market places) and to handle USA tariffs is not a good look.

I have other stores and I'm tempted to close my Tindie store.

Steve 

[Dean Netherton]

I have worked on and number of large scale web systems - well large by Australian standards... The idea that your site can have a greater than 1 week maintenance period is ridiculous - the very definition of gas-lighting...

Their social media person, after a couple of days, eventually posted on their mastodon account - that they were not ware of what was happening - and would try and find out.  The social media person, after days of outage, was left in the dark as to what was going on!  To then come back and try and convince a bunch of techies that this was all part of a plan - that a new website was coming soon - to be patient - beggars belief.

Latest post - a few days ago now - was they were almost done - "doing final testing" - and all will be wonderful!

Huh!  Final testing - on production - what?

Just my personal guesses/speculations:

* The dev team, if one even exists, has been seriously under-invested for years - seems to have no technical leadership or required level of competent to operate a web site like Tindie.

* Perhaps they experienced a breach.  I feel like there has been an uptick in hacking/breaching of websites globally - but specifically US based sites -  since the start of war in the middle east started.  Were the team's security practices sufficiently disciplined enough?  Was the site and infrastructure reviewed and patched regularly?

* Perhaps it just 'crashed'.  From my recent experience with the site - its stability was slowly declining - getting 504 - timeouts, etc.  And their forum was being overwhelmed with spam - making that, next to useless to use.

* Whatever this maintenance or migration is - there appears to be no rollback plan - no way to keep the old system running and switch over when ready.

* Backups that can not be restored are not backups!  Have they had issues with their database?  Did they attempt a migration, screw up the the DB - and now are buggered!  Or did the DB just die - and say "I am out of here!"

* Did someone think they could vibe code their way out of this?   I left my job as a web developer because I saw more and more devs 'vibe' coding and making lots of technical debt and mess - I didn't want to be involved in that approach - so left the industry.  I don't know on this one - I doubt it - but these days - the stories I hear!

* Not only has their main site been offline, so has their forum and blog sites - I would have expected these sites to be on separate infrastructure - not have the same deployment cycles.  They all went offline at the same time.  Another technical failure? Or a deliberate shutdown to avoid the need to communicate with customers! 

Consequences of long outage:

Paypal: It been over a week now - I assume a lot of buyers have started to claim back their payments.  The Paypal system is probably noting am uptick in chargebacks for the Tindie a/c.  I dont know what Paypal might do in this case - they, and it might happen automatically, block or close Tindie's paypal account.

Google Ranking: at what point will google start to de-list the page ranking Tindie has developed over the years! 

Trust: As a seller - can we ever trust the operators of Tindie to not screw-up again - do we want to risk the reputational damage to our customers again!  Customers may also not fully trust this platform ever again!

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Its all rather sad.  But also kind of weirdly fascinating - to watch a business self-implode and destroy itself...

The only other platform that I know of, that services the same market space - is https://lectronz.com/  

They seem to technically know how to develop and operate a website -- they are small (although they are probably experiencing recent uptick in numbers).  I do think they need a bit more marketing effort -- but maybe if more buyers and sellers move there (that network effect) - it will hit that threshold and come to be the preferred choice.

Now - where's my popcorn......

Dean

[Jeff Greer]

My personal website was compromised recently. I have had the server since 2009 and the website since the early 2000's. (It was an early educational page for my classes.) I am an amateur webmaster. It was last compromised in 2006. Fortunately, I keep backups. 

As the previous poster mentioned, a lot of this has been going around.

Jeff

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