On another Forum that I use the "man in charge" is kind enough to post a banner warning of planned outages and apologizing for unplanned outages.
It would be great to see the same thing here.
That other Forum shut down completely for a day or so about a week ago due to a malicious attack. They immediatley put up a single page with info explaining what had happened and updating us as they worked on the problem.
I like when sites (e.g. GitHub, Travis CI) have a site status page and dedicated twitter feed (since a site status page doesn't do you much good if you can't access it). It really helps ease the mind when you're wondering "Is it just something wrong on my end? Are they aware of the problem? Are they working on the problem?".
I do think it would be helpful for parts of the Arduino operations to be more transparent. There are plenty of communication channels to the community available but they are not used often enough by the Arduino team. I believe we will see this situation improve in the near future. You might have noticed that recently Arduino employees have started participating in certain forum sections (according to their areas of expertise). Hopefully that will eventually happen in the "Website and Forum" section too.
I only saw one 502 but had trouble signing in. It goes through all the motions of sign-in and you still can't see that you're logged in. Refresh a couple of times and it comes right.
The problem was reported to the responsible people and they had began working on it before this thread even started.
This is why I think more transparency from Arduino would be so helpful. There is no reason the issue report and progress updates couldn't have been done in a public bug tracker. That would allow the other people experiencing the problem to see that it had already been reported (and avoid wasting their time and the time of Arduino employees submitting duplicate reports) and track what was being done about the issue. In some cases (e.g. security-critical items), it does make sense to work in secret, but in this case (and most), it's only harmful.
pert:
In some cases (e.g. security-critical items), it does make sense to work in secret, but in this case (and most), it's only harmful.
I can see that there may be a case for keeping the security solution secret but I certainly don't see any reason to keep secret the fact that they are dealing with a security issue.
Back in the day when Government was for the purpose of enabling Lord Muck to get richer at the expense of everyone else there was reason for secrecy. Now that Government (and hopefully business) is for the purpose of serving the public I can think of very few situations where secrecy is warranted. The programming and management of this Forum most certainly does not warrant it.
Is there a Sunday maintenance window? The site seems really slow and I've had it throw 502 and 504 a few times in the last hour. If it does actually render a page properly it's very slow to get there.
I seem to recall the same thing happening last Sunday too, hence the question.
Ironically, it threw 504 when I tried to post this
Bunch more 502, 504. Enough that I gave up & worked on some code I wanted to get done. That's now working and it appears that the site is back to normal too.
