More appropriately I fell back on The Longest Day. 
Several of us met up at the Giraffe Boards.
:D:cool:
Hey - my coffee mug aint fashionable!
It’s a place of both beauty and terror, a place where it’s intensely, blindingly bright for about half the day, and totally dark the other half. During the year the temperatures can vary from absurdly hot to incredibly cold. Sometimes water or ice falls from the ceiling, and the air can move in currents strong enough to blow things around. It’s infested with an endless variety of hostile life forms that run, slither, and fly, most of which hate humans and attack them at any opportunity. It’s a barren, hostile place filled with dirt and bugs, completely lacking in armchairs or appliances, and clearly not a place where humans were ever meant to be. What we know about it comes from a combination of unmanned remote-sensing instrumentation like window thermometers and a few brave explorers who have ventured into it for brief periods with suitable protective gear, and returned with harrowing tales of adventure.
Yes it was nice and pretty. I actually still had it on my phone so I uploaded that to imgur, here: SDMB Outage 2019-08-05 Mon - Album on Imgur.
Yeah, nice and pretty. A likely planned and unannounced outage.
Here is mine.
Dang, Wolfie, you sure wax poetical. 
For me, Outside is where my Amazon deliveries come from.
“Wolfie”? :dubious:
It’s what my friends call me. 
I thought the preferred appellation would be “Pup.”
Yay!
It does look that way—in which case, it was not nice not to give us advance notice as many sites do.
That “maintenance” splash screen has been around for months, at least. It occurred randomly over that time along with the 502 or 504 errors. It wasn’t prepared specifically for this outage.
Good to know, though I’d never seen that form before yesterday. Yesterday every time I tried to access the SDMB, that’s what was displayed. I did not get any other errors or messages.
And, notice I said “likely planned and unannounced outage.” Emphasis mine. Until we hear from TPTB I’ll stand by that conclusion.
Since I pay for my membership here, yes, I think I’m owed an explanation at least as good as the one I get from my cable company (“We are experiencing service interruptions in your area and are working to solve the problem.”)
Who does the maintenance? Do they have a phone number?
This is the Straight Dope… the answers should be more forthcoming!
That “maintenance” splash screen on boards.straightdope.com directed me to www.straightdope.com. Which was displaying trashed html garbage. So no, it didn’t look like planned downtime.
And my google search for The Straight Dope is now back to returning “Straight Dope Message Board - Powered by vBulletin” as the first result, after that briefly tumbled to 7th. “The Straight Dope, The Inside Story of Sport’s Biggest Drug Scandal” (An Australian book which was at my number 2 for a long time) has now fallen off the first page, and Wikipedia, which was at my number 1 for a long time as fallen to #2.
When I’m working on a network problem, every damn phone call I have to take about “Why isn’t this thing fixed yet?” delays my repairs. Do you want the guys to take half an hour to design a sprightly message that explains the problem in detail?