Ray Saintonge wrote:
What I would suggest is the idea of the developer (or steward) on duty. Whenever he logs in his name would appear listed in the side-bar, ready to be contacted in an emergency. (If he's nice maybe he'll even have the privilege of turning it off if he wants to work quietly. :-) )
The best way to get the immediate attention of the developers is via IRC. There's usually at least one of us in #wikimedia and/or #mediawiki on irc.freenode.net; between Europe (gwicke, shaihulud and others), the US (me) and Australia (Tim) a fair chunk of time is covered. Since we are total geeks, we're online a lot. ;)
(#wikipedia is more chatty, so we may be more likely to notice an undirected request for help in #mediawiki. Include someone's name when you say something to get their attention specifically.)
See: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC_channels
We do have an emergency anti-spam filter in the wiki which we can update to cut off spambots/vandalbots which post a common text over and over; I updated it immediately after reading the first message in this thread, but if we had heard about the attack when it started it would have saved an awful lot of deleting.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)