Recently, there was an outage that affected the forum. Initially, the site was unreachable, and later, the site redirected to a page:
Quote:
L19 is temporarily down for some scheduled maintenance. Don't worry, we'll be back soon! 
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?
