Why was vb.org down
 

vb.org and .com have been down for hours why? Can some staff member tell us why and for so long. Before posting this the last time I checked about 30 mins ago, they were down in total 3 hrs or so

There was server maintenance going on, vb.com also had downtime.

A quick post of what was going to happen is what I would of done

Yes & No ^

There's always more than one way to look at things:

- Most feel that you should normally notify members, so they don't try to visit when its down and that way less of an inconvenience to said members. *This is the typical way of doing things, lets their members know what is going on and generally viewed as more professional.
- There are some who prefer not to notify the masses, their member base etc and in-turn they are not letting anyone such as a hacker "bad guy" etc be aware of when an upgrade or similar is going on (at the time an upgrade is performed the /install/ folder needs to be present and they could at the time the upgrade is scheduled attempt to disrupt the site). *I find myself doing this for many clients and more so in the late-night hours i.e. after 12am my local time (or theirs usually).
- Sometimes the tech performing maintenance is not the site webmaster or similar and does not have access to place up an announcement, this is dependent upon if the action taking place on the site i.e. the maintenance requires thew forum to be disabled or not, if so then they should have access and could then place up a notice/announcement regarding the downtime - if the site is not required to be offline then the server administrator may perform the maintenance and the site simply show as down or not be accessible sporadically during said maintenance.

So normally yes, you make a new Notice or Announcement however if you're a company or more security prone than others you would not announce it and simply place up a notice with enough info to warrant their return to the site but one that also gives enough info for them to know its down temporarily and will return. Then again as we see in the third scenario I listed, there may not be a way for notice to be given (despite any notice can be given ahead of time, situational at best in this scenario).

Or make a section called maintenance Announcements and only allow paying members to see it then post in there when there is a maintenance happening this way no hackers will see it

That makes sense to me and it would be very easy to do.

That would be completely ineffective. At any given time who knows how many accounts hackers have access to- not to mention the ones that actually have legitimate licenses. It only takes one to tweet something about upcoming downtime and the whole "customers only" forum is rendered utterly useless.

The question has been answered. Closing thread. We apologize for the inconvenience but this isn't an issue up for debate.

Apparently they need an actual working database server :erm:

They didnt have this while the maintenence was happening - which btw, happens every month.