What I understood from this thread is: if you have a planned maintenance windows between 13 and 14 GMT, it would be appreciated if you could: - create a simple page that says: "We are working on our servers between 13 and 14 GMT and Wikipedia might be unavailable during that time" - replace the usual error message with the newly created page as close as possible to 12:59 - reinstate the usual error message at 14:01 (or whenever the maintenance ends)
Nobody (of the millions of anonymous users) really cares about whether a certain db server is down or up at 13:49, or some router is rebooting at 13:23. They just wanna know when they can come back to read about spark plugs (sic!). AFAIK, this is the way big websites like Yahoo do it. It seems like a simple thing to do, so perhaps you could explain calmly and without ironies where is the difficulty? Strainu 2011/5/25 Domas Mituzas <midom.li...@gmail.com>: > Hi! > >> That's... completely missing the point. Yes the specific errors faced were >> unexpected or unforseen, BUT they were a* direct result* of the maintenance >> between 13:00 and 14:00. I am simply passing on the feeling of our >> readership; which was that the situation was badly communicated to them. > > As majority of our users are anons, who visit us once a day or two, we should > probably have started a communication campaign at least two months before the > maintenance. > We practice a lot during fundraisers :-) > > OTOH, if there's no downtime, maybe we're causing quite some frustration with > superfluous communication? :-) > >> I am trying to share my experience here as a sysadmin and website operator; > > Oh, finally we got some sysadmins and website operators here. > As a sysadmin you sure understand that in larger distributed systems which > are not all built on a set of SPOFs there can be various failure modes, > happening at various layers and various fuzziness. > As a website operator you sure know that it is lots of effort to prepare > boilerplates for every possible situation :-) > >> users hate downtime/maintenance, and will complain about it endlessly. > > You have some annoying users, our users are awesome and don't complain > endlessly! > >> Improving our communication of planned maintenance is definitely a good idea. > > So is curing cancer. > > Marcus Buck wrote: >> Domas, what are you trying to achieve with your comments on Tom's >> suggestions? > > > Put some clue in? > >> The sensible reaction (from a person who is involved in the maintenance) >> would be: > > I know nobody likes this, but sensible reaction is to work on good operation > rather than standing in front of a mirror and trying five hundred different > "I'm sorry" phrases. > You look too much from that single position, that "communication is good", > without weighting costs or other options. > > Cheers, > Domas > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l