Forum down message

[Vinnie Terranova]

A few days ago the SCS forum was down. Although I could read posts, I could not create a new post. And sometimes that can be quite frustrating. Ofcourse I know that occasionally a forum can be down for a while. Sometimes because maintenance or upgrade of the forum is necessary. And sometimes the forum is down due to a technical error. I mean, the world is not perfect.

But it can be quite annoying if the forum is down, without me knowing that. In this case I read a post, and decided to comment on that post by creating a new post. So I wrote quite some text and then I clicked the 'Submit'-button. And then nothing happens... Because the forum was down.
Luckily for me I had copied the text right before I clicked the 'Submit'-button, so I could save it in a notepad file for later. But it would be nice if I had read a message about the forum being down, before writing a new post. And what if I had not copied the text and saved in a notepad file...? Al my writings would have been for nothing...

So, therefore it would be nice for us to see a message if we visit the forum, while it's down. Something like: "Unfortunately there is a problem with the forums. You therefore cannot post. We are working on a fix. Please be patient."

P.S. I've wrote something similar in one of the comments of the Texas - Landmarks and Prefab blog, because at that time the forum was down. But I thought, let me also make a similar post about this in the SCS forum in the official section.

[Madkine]

For a message to be posted advising there is an issue, the forum has to be working, which it quite obviously was not.

[Vinnie Terranova]

I know. But I was not thinking of a normal post, but more something like a popup message, or showing an image with text on it. I don't know what the technical possibilities of phpBB are regarding the forum partially being down.

[plykkegaard]

It can be solved if you want
But an admin need to know the forum is down
This the first step

[Madkine]

And once they know it's down it's generally back up quite quickly.