From 9a6109bd1dba05cc9c32b981c4ec96ecf68edc8b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: John McLear <john@mclear.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2026 09:53:11 +0100
Subject: [PATCH] 10,000 commits. Worth a pause.

Thanks to every contributor: PRs, issues, reviews, translations, plugins, answered questions. This project runs on volunteer effort, not one person or one company. That's by design and it's why it's lasted.

Thanks to everyone running an instance: schools, newsrooms, gov departments, or just yourself. You trusted us with your documents. We don't take that lightly.

Thanks to the wider FOSS community. We've relied on other people's open source work more than we can credit individually, and tried to give some back. If you've never contributed to a FOSS project, this is your sign. Code, docs, translations, bug reports, or just running an instance and telling people about it, all of it counts.

The migration to modern JS tooling has been one of the best things to happen to this codebase. Easier to contribute to, easier to maintain, easier to build on, which is what matters for a 15+ year old project that intends to keep going.

Going forward: keep Etherpad boring, stable, self-hostable, no enshittification, while staying open to the plugins and integrations that make it useful. We need more maintainers and more instances. If that's you, open an issue.

Here's to the next 10,000. John McLear