On 11/18/2011 06:51 PM, Ben Hartshorne wrote:
3) throw up a banner on the edit page itself. The
time when we want to
inform someone that there is going to be maintenance that will impede
editing is when the user begins an edit. (at the moment we inform them
when they try to save the edit in the form of an error message.) If there
was a banner on all edit pages that informed the user not to save their
document during a specific time period, they could choose to postpone the
edit or finish quickly.
Yes, maybe this is a good solution. But there is far too much
information on the edit page already, almost like some
shrink-wrap or click-through license text that nobody reads.
For a beginner or anonymous editor, the edit page could just
have the warning instead of the edit box if any maintenance
is planned for the next 30 minutes: "Please come back later".
Make it super simple and friendly, with a short explanation
that you only do this 7 hours per year, and that donations
pay for keeping these servers running.
For experienced users, all the clutter with copyright warnings
could be folded away, because they already know. And your
information about planned maintenance could be shown as
a warning: "Please edit, but be careful".
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se