Suggestion: Downtime notification

[Ginpanther]

I'm not here to give anybody grief for doing maintenance and updates. Entirely the opposite - I'm singing your accolades for paying attention and updating things and applying patches. I don't think I need to cite the old regime as a reason why this type of behavior is welcomed.

I do have a request: Can planned maintenance like Wednesday's be posted a little ahead of time, even 24 hours in advance? Surely there will be situations with extenuating circumstances, such as you're responding to some sort of zero-day issue that needs to be patched. But if it's something even remotely planned in advance, let folks know (and please forgive me if I somehow missed that notice)? Over the years we've all learned the hard way that sometimes routine maintenance events can run long or encounter unanticipated problems. In my experience, most of the user-base is pretty forgiving of extended outages; all they ask is that there be some notice ahead of time so they aren't left wondering if there was a crash or an attack of some sorts.

Another idea (and I don't know if the existing infrastructure would allow it) is to have a redirect to a notification page that says, "We're in maintenance, have some patience." That could do good things for those who don't read maintenance window warnings.

Thanks for doing the good work on keeping the gears turning, I'm sorry y'all had trouble with things! I hope my ideas will help with making future efforts a little less surprising to folks, though.

[Caretaker]

Agreed, it was intended to be planned maintenance to replace a dead drive. It was not planned that a reboot & a software update would break PHP so badly and I apologize for the extended downtime.

I'll work on a means of setting the site "offline for maintenance" with an appropriate page that can be toggled on in the event of extended downtime in the future.

[Ginpanther]

@Carenath Trust me, I know how that type of thing goes thanks to the various roles I've held in my career. "Routine thing X? Takes 20 minutes? Sure! Except for these four other things breaking at the same time just because the universe has a terrible sense of humor. Hope you weren't planning to sleep tonight!" Stuff happens, totally understandable and don't blame you at all.

[Vae]

Would a Twitter be good for this kind of function, or any other significant news for the forum in the event of if being broken, or just in general?

[Sidewalk Surfboard]

I'm thinking maybe a mass announcement on both Discord and the IRC chat would be useful in this matter.

[Ginpanther]

I'm thinking maybe a mass announcement on both Discord and the IRC chat would be useful in this matter.

I like the logic but the problem is IRC and Discord are both dependent upon two things. 1) people being active in the channel at the time of the announcement and then propagating the information forward to inquiring parties as well as 2) attending membership. If you aren't on those channels, you're hosed - and there's little way for people on either tech platform to push the information out to everyone else who is not part of that platform. Twitter, as @Vae suggested, is sporting two things in it's favor. One, it is more of a "push" notification - you don't "have to be present to win," just subscribed. And while to be fully effective it still requires #2 (joining/membership), it does have the benefit that it can be sought out and viewed in retrospect by those who aren't actively subscribed as long as the account is well-communicated and kept public (everything the fat Digimon didn't do on a proactive basis).

The other challenge is what we saw: Two medias, related, but only one was remotely active with updates on the topic because the information source only attends that one platform. That's not the fault of @@Carenath. Luckily for the rest of us, @Umbra.Exe was playing relay service between the two. I'm not going to ask the administration to bridge the information across multiple domains - I know from experience that it's just too difficult. Consolidation to a "single source of truth" is the best approach.

[Charrio]

Does the forum have a Facebook page?
I don't use twitter so if possible would like to see status posts there too.

 

[Nolow]

I would like a there to be a Twitter because that was the first place i ran to in search of a reason the forums went down. 

[Toboe]

I like the logic but the problem is IRC and Discord are both dependent upon two things. 1) people being active in the channel at the time of the announcement and then propagating the information forward to inquiring parties as well as 2) attending membership. If you aren't on those channels, you're hosed - and there's little way for people on either tech platform to push the information out to everyone else who is not part of that platform. Twitter, as @Vae suggested, is sporting two things in it's favor. One, it is more of a "push" notification - you don't "have to be present to win," just subscribed. And while to be fully effective it still requires #2 (joining/membership), it does have the benefit that it can be sought out and viewed in retrospect by those who aren't actively subscribed as long as the account is well-communicated and kept public (everything the fat Digimon didn't do on a proactive basis).

The other challenge is what we saw: Two medias, related, but only one was remotely active with updates on the topic because the information source only attends that one platform. That's not the fault of @@Carenath. Luckily for the rest of us, @Umbra.Exe was playing relay service between the two. I'm not going to ask the administration to bridge the information across multiple domains - I know from experience that it's just too difficult. Consolidation to a "single source of truth" is the best approach.

Appending "| Forum DOWN" or "|Planned maintenance on BLAH expected downtime XX" to the IRC channels topic could be done,

edit:

OR one could include "|Forum Status: [twitterlink]" in the IRC topic

The advantage of the second option would of course be, that you get both the Twitter and the IRC crowd at the effort of changing the IRC topic once and maintaining the Twitter.

Edited October 30, 2015 by Toboe