Site maintenance at bad time

[Mooseman]

Twice now, I have been working on a post and when I go to submit it, I get a message saying that the site is in maintenance. Tonight I was sweating bullets because I had been working over an hour on this last post and I could have lost it. I stayed up and waited for the site to come back and luckily, the auto-save still had it. This was between midnight and 00:50 EDT.

I understand that maintenance has to be done but couldn't it be scheduled at a better time, like 4, 5 or 6AM? At 6 AM, that would put the west coast at 3AM.

Thanks.

 

[BlazingTrails]

Or at least make an announcement of when it will be.

 

[DAlastDON]

I am glad that you did not lose the post that you put so much time into. It would have frustrated me too. A notice via post or a banner stating when planed server maintenance is going to occur would be a nice gesture.

In my line of work when we have to take the system down for emergency repair because of a service impairment affecting alot of people, it happens when ever it happens and we get it back on as soon as possible. If it is maintenance that consists of a reconfiguration or upgrading equipment not impairing the plant then it is done in a maintenance window between 12am to 6am. Statically this window of time is when the least number of subscribers are utilizing the service. The goal is to impact as few subscribers as possible. It is sometimes announced in the subscriber's bill but most of the time it is not.

 

[Mooseman]

Same at my work. We have a national system that goes down for maintenance daily for 4 hours from 10PM to 2AM Eastern. We're a 24 hour operation so that means we have people wanting to access the system on the west coast at 7PM that get cut off. Even for us at 10PM, it's very frustrating so I imagine those on the west coast. If anybody had any brains, they would do it from 2 to 6AM to have the least impact but I digress.

Anyhoo, for here, a banner might not help in some cases because if it's added while you're typing a post for a long period, you won't see it if it's posted just 10 or 15 minutes prior. Or if the system can send a pop-up, similar to the "Someone has posted a reply, click Read to see" but make it permanent until clicked, that would work. Just an idea.

I guess a solution, when typing an especially long post, would be to use a text editor on the computer and then copy and paste into the post. Can still be a problem if there are photos involved.

 

[Sparky]

A little notice at the top saying "hey at X time the site will be down for a while" would be nice. Doesn't have to be a lot of notice, just going up the day before would be fine. Seriously, you can't be writing a post for 12 hours lol