Hello,
When the wiki has problems talking to the database, it responds with a message saying "Sorry! The wiki is experiencing some technical difficulties, and cannot contact the database server.". That's fine.
However, it seems that the message is sent along with an HTTP status code of 200 (OK). I suggest that such error messages be delivered with an HTTP status code of 500 (internal server error). This will prevent un-cool things such as search engines recording an error page.
If my suggestion is accepted, then the text of the error message should be expanded a bit (possibly using a number of whitespaces), so that Internet Explorer will not replace the error message with its own "user friendly" messages (i.e. MSN commercials).
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org