Hi everybody,

welcome to 2024, hope you find a good start in the new year.

I want to get your attention about this project once more. @angular-translate/owners @angular-translate/members @angular-translate/core

First of all want to say thank you for all your work and contributions in the past. Since the project creation from Pascal, it was a community driven project always. In fact, that was the way I got hooked.

But, this project has been moving in a somehow transcendence mode for some years. Specifically, since AngularJS final extended supported exceeded on January 2022, the overall issue rate here has dropped. Also most likely, some users may have seen already the "degraded pace" in commits, release and also issues.

We have major ideas/issues we won't do ever, sometimes because of underlaying AngularJS security/design decisions. We can't change them without breaking everything and building a bigger rewrite. Also, I don't see we adding more features anymore. And finally, if something will break with future clients/systems (browsers), we would have to deal with deprecated and unsupported ecosystem. Apart from that, our build setup is also getting on in years. Even this stuff is sometimes unsupported, if I get it right.

I have been putting off writing this message for some time: We have to put this project down finally. My idea was putting the repository in the lock down (GitHub's archive/readonly). Everything stay here and everybody can grab the source code, even forking it.

Some days ago, I was contacted by @joeeames, how brought up the idea either supporting us or taking care of it for providing further support for the users (probably mostly enterprises) with a further long term support. He also recommends we should create a final release for getting the users attention at most.. yes, that is right and was also my plan.

Instead of a further slow death, here are the steps I would recommend:

1. Prepend the README.md with a "flashing" text informing about the project end. => This creates a final decision.
2. Create a final patch release 2.19.1 with the same information text and link to the README.md. This will update npmjs.org also. => This makes users aware, at least the one who read changelogs. The other ones will not care anyway.
3. Enable the GitHub archive mode (means readonly). => Marks project state. All documentation, issues, demos, links to stack overflow will stay.
4. Enable npmjs deprecation messages. => Marks project state.

In theory, we could give someone (like Joe) access to this repository managing everything, but I cannot trust someone I don't know and give the control about a project (GitHub + npmjs). This is not personally and I believe his motivation, but such take overs / security issues have been done too often in the past with in-use libraries.
But I'm fine linking to a maintained fork from our readme, even from the release notes if things are clean at this point.

So, here we are. Please engage, please say what you think.