beeminder was down for a whole 5 minutes or so and i wanted to share the cuteness of the error page for anyone who didn't get to see it


also, to add just one useful thing to this post: maybe the twitter link could be replaced by a different social media account? or by a dedicated forum post? (i don’t know if i even have my twitter account anymore, and without logging in couldn’t look at any tweets, so it seems like maybe not an ideal place to put updates.)

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Ha, thanks! We call that the poppy page. Great point that Twitter is no longer the right choice for a public log now that you have to be logged in to view it. One workaround is this:

https://nitter.net/beemstat

But who knows how long that will be up – presumably it’s not Twitter-approved.

I’d love to migrate that whole history into a forum thread and then use the forum. The forum is hosted on totally different infrastructure so it’s a mostly ok choice for a status page. Except for problems at the DNS level that could potentially take out both www.beeminder.com and forum.beeminder.com. Getting @adamwolf’s opinion on that would be good.

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I think it’s probably reasonable to point folks to the forum and plan on using that as the general place to view status updates for Beeminder downtime. You can invent scenarios where it wouldn’t be as nice of a solution as something different, but I think it’s entirely reasonable.

That outage page isn’t immutable. If the outage is one where folks can still see that page, but we know it’s going to be long enough where folks would want to follow status, but also the forum is broken and we can’t just fix it, we could register whoopsminder.com and put some plaintext up on there. If folks can’t see that page, or we can’t edit it, there is some value in having a Schelling point, I guess (it was quite nice when Twitter was a reasonable Schelling point grumble grumble). Is there enough value there to put much work in? /shrug?

Have we ever had an outage before due to us messing up domain registration or messing up all of DNS? I don’t think we have.

Maybe we use status.bmndr.co/status.beeminder.com? Have it redirect to a locked forum thread. Even if we lose the beeminder.com domain through a series of freak antilotteries, we could point status.bmndr.co somewhere.

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heh, we must have had this idea before. we already have status.beeminder.com and status.bmndr.co and they currently redirect to the twitter thread. :slight_smile:

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