[Toolserver-l] RfC: globalsitenotice

[Alex]

DaB. wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> at the moment it is difficult to inform our toolusers (people that use our 
> tools) about planed maintainces, downtimes and other important things.
> 
> So I had the idea today that a kind of global sitenotice (like the one in the 
> wikimedia-projects) would be nice and a easy solution for that. The easiest 
> way to implement it is IMHO a simple textfile, that toolauthors 
> may/can/should/whatever insert in their tools. I created such a file, it can 
> be found at /var/www/sitenotice on wolfsbane and via 
> http://toolserver.org/sitenotice. For normal the file would be empty or 
> contains only a empty div-container. If the roots know about a planed downtime 
> or an important change, they would insert a short text in the file and our 
> toolusers would be informed.
> 
> The setup is differend to status.toolserver.org, because status lists only the 
> current status, not a futuraly status.
> 
> Please comment at the toolserver-mailinglist and tell me/us if you would 
> implement the sitenotice in your tools.
> 

I think this would be a good idea. I've actually been considering
something like this for my tools. My idea was to use multiple files. One
would be for issues that would affect every tool, like if the webserver
was going to be down. Others would be for issues that may only affect a
couple tools, like one of the DB-servers being down, or high replag on a
server. That way tools that don't need DB access or aren't significantly
affected by high replag won't have unnecessary notices but the tools
that do need it can still have the notice.

For things like replag, the notice wouldn't even need to be changed by a
person, there could just be a script run every few minutes that would
automatically add the notice to the file if replag was > N seconds.

-- 
Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)