Recently, there was an outage that affected the forum. Initially, the site was unreachable, and later, the site redirected to a page:


We have a group of admins on the forum who can address some technical matters, but server side issues are bottlenecked to a single person: one person owns the server where L19 lives, so if there are any server side problems, it's necessary to communicate and/or resolve those issues through that single person. We took steps to distribute the administration of L19 - forum code is publicly available on github, etc. But we don't have a distributed solution for fixing server issues and/or communicating them.

In this case, the forum problem was known and worked on in a timely manner. So having some sort of distributed administration may not have sped up the fix - it could potentially have slowed things down, given that someone was already working to resolve the issue.

But on the other hand, it could be a good idea to brainstorm if there are ways to have communication about what's going on. We kind of have a bus factor of 1 in these scenarios, and while I don't want to go so far as to say that this is a serious problem for server administration, it'd be nice to at least have a higher bus factor for communication.

Maybe this means a policy of communicating about L19 through a separate forum: on Reddit - or perhaps a Facebook group? I'm not really sure, though, I think discussion would have merit. I understand how frustrating it may be to be confused about what's going on with the forum and/or what the expectation is for getting it fixed.

Any thoughts?

_________________
be immersed

I'm just grateful for all the good work y'all are doing.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

My two main guides in life:
My mother and my wife.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

We already have a status page on SL. https://senseis.xmp.net/?LifeIn19x19%2FStatus

I still get the error message "L19 is temporarily down for some scheduled maintenance. Don't worry, we'll be back soon! " when clicking on "View unread posts".

Me, too. But because of Joaz's message on SL, I tried logging in, and that worked.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

My two main guides in life:
My mother and my wife.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I logged out and logged in again, then clicked on "View unread posts". It worked, but when I click a second time on "View unread posts", I get the error message again.

Edit: I erased all my cookies and this solved the problem.

I would like for this page and/or whatever means of communication we think is best to be linked on the static "L19 is temporarily down for some scheduled maintenance. Don't worry, we'll be back soon!" page. I didn't personally know about the SL page, and I'm on here all of the time.

In the event of an outage, if the user is provided with a link to a page where we can communicate, then it clears up a lot of confusion IMO. I had no idea what was going on.

_________________
be immersed

Why not a twitter account? This way, people can tell the account the forum is down, and the account can tweet it's down and give updates

Because some of us are over 30.



This is a great idea.