Discourse has announced they will be performing scheduled maintenance on the server hosting Arduino Forum during the following period:
2023-03-17 02:00 - 2023-03-17 06:00 UTC
At some point during this maintenance period, the forum may be in a read-only state:
The read-only state is expected to last less than one hour.
Thanks for the heads up
When and where will that message be displayed ?
The last time that the forum went into read only mode I only became aware of it when trying to post a reply which was a little annoying
As you say, I think it is shown when you attempt an operation that is prevented by the read-only status.
That is a shame
As I figured out early this morning after typing a relatively long message 
At the time of the prior discussion here, my understanding of the forum's behavior when in this "read only mode" was based on reports from other users (example).
During the last maintenance period, I was using the forum while it was in that mode and so was able to personally observe the behavior. What I now know is that, in addition to the dialog that appears when you attempt to perform any "write" action, the read only status is communicated to the users by a persistent banner shown at the top of every forum page:
Not as descriptive as it could be.
That particular message could mean almost anything.
Maybe it should state that "maintenance" is the cause.
And where possible different messages for other issues.
Don't think there is much need for too many different ones but it would at least give the user a clue WHY.
I can easily adjust the text if anyone has a proposal for improvements.
The forum framework doesn't offer the capability to set a different message depending on the reason for the forum being in read only mode.
It is possible to manually define any arbitrary message for the "Global Notice" banner that you see advertising Arduino IoT Cloud in the screenshot I shared above. So if there was some situation where there was a planned period of the forum being in read only mode for some other reason, I could communicate about it via that "Global Notice" banner. For this reason, and since I can't imagine what reason other than maintenance there could be for putting the site in read only mode, I don't think the lack of an automatic case-specific read only mode banner text capability is a significant deficiency.
Given that it is slightly problematic to have different messages I would agree that the message "as stands" is probably the best option.
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