[Wikipedia-l] Maintenance page and web spiders

[Neil Harris]

The new maintenance page is great! But the links on it should be 
disabled for non logged-in users so that web spiders don't exercise the 
high-overhead functions on the maintenance page, bogging down the server.

For anoymous IPs they should probably just return a message like "You 
must be logged in to use this function: please click here to create an 
account."

Speculation: Could this be the reason for the recent outage?

Neil