On 11/18/2011 06:51 PM, Ben Hartshorne wrote:
- 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".