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