This is answer a Facebook question.
Looks like things are back to normal now.
I got a Discourse error message saying SDMB could not be found.
That was fun. Because it was quick.
The banner said “This site is in read only mode. Please continue to brows, but replying, likes, and other actions are disabled for now.”
What likes?
Likes are the way the cool kids decorate their brows!
Most likely it’s just a standard message, as Discourse comes with the ability to like posts. We turned it off. We might have kept them if they were just decorative, but apparently likes change the thread sorting algorithm.
I get it! So “eyebrow threading” is when you collect all the posts about eyebrows into one thread.
Normally, the reason a site like this is in read mode for a while is that they are doing some kind of update or maintenance behind the scenes.
If you go to www.discourse.org, down at the bottom of the page, in faint gray letters, is a “Status” link. There’s a list there of planned maintenance, including one that looks like it might have applied to us:
Description
We are moving some of our Enterprise sites to a new hardware class; these sites will be in read-only for up to approximately half an hour.
If you would like to know whether your site is affected by this maintenance, please contact us.
Schedule
July 17, 2021 1:00AM - July 17, 2021 10:00AM UTC
One quick way you can notice if the board is in read-only mode is by simply noticing those little blue dots at the upper right corner of each post. When you view any post for the first time, the blue dot is present but disappears after a few seconds. If those dots aren’t disappearing, then the board is read-only.
@codinghorror: I don’t think this is a good way to do this. Most people, even admins, aren’t going to constantly go check the main page that promotes the hosting. It would make far more sense if such automatically PMed an admin, and that the board owners could choose to display those status messages.
If this is already available, then I would like to request that such be used here.
I actually just found this useful. The board was painfully slow (taking several minutes just to get to the home page and failing in one tab. I checked the discourse link and immediately saw that there was a server problem affecting several sites. If I had to rely on accessing the SDMB to get status when it is down, it would be…less helpful.
If you look at the status page, it has a SUBSCRIBE button.
It will send you notifications by email, or in several other ways.