Suggestion - Streamlined Way to Report Major Forum Issues

[Gregoryisgodistan]

The forum was completely down earlier today for numerous, if not all, users, including me. When I went to the help page, it told me to submit a post in the Technical Forum if I found a bug, but of course I couldn't since the forums were down. In the end, I submitted a GHR since I didn't know what else to do, but I'm still not sure if that was the right way to report it. So I think there should be a clearer way to report that you can't post to the forum for whatever reason. Maybe have a separate category of GHR? Telling people to post in the Technical Forum is fine for most bugs, but if the bug is stopping them from posting, it really doesn't work.

[Jeckland]

The forum was completely down earlier today for numerous, if not all, users, including me. When I went to the help page, it told me to submit a post in the Technical Forum if I found a bug, but of course I couldn't since the forums were down. In the end, I submitted a GHR since I didn't know what else to do, but I'm still not sure if that was the right way to report it. So I think there should be a clearer way to report that you can't post to the forum for whatever reason. Maybe have a separate category of GHR? Telling people to post in the Technical Forum is fine for most bugs, but if the bug is stopping them from posting, it really doesn't work.

I think there should be a status site offsite for stuff like this. If you remember about a week ago the whole game broke, and there is currently no obvious way to report this.

[Leutria]

I will note that you don't really need to report major outages. If I recall the admin get an e-mail whenever the servers are down, and obviously whatever moderators are online at the moment would notice and report it.

[Oaledonia]

I will note that you don't really need to report major outages. If I recall the admin get an e-mail whenever the servers are down, and obviously whatever moderators are online at the moment would notice and report it.

Not only that, but you could also e-mail the admins directly if the issue is serious enough.

[Jeckland]

I will note that you don't really need to report major outages. If I recall the admin get an e-mail whenever the servers are down, and obviously whatever moderators are online at the moment would notice and report it.

Not only that, but you could also e-mail the admins directly if the issue is serious enough.

The only place I know of where the admin email is publicly available is the forums. And if they're down that's useless.

[Land of Minecraft]

The forum was completely down earlier today for numerous, if not all, users, including me. When I went to the help page, it told me to submit a post in the Technical Forum if I found a bug, but of course I couldn't since the forums were down. In the end, I submitted a GHR since I didn't know what else to do, but I'm still not sure if that was the right way to report it. So I think there should be a clearer way to report that you can't post to the forum for whatever reason. Maybe have a separate category of GHR? Telling people to post in the Technical Forum is fine for most bugs, but if the bug is stopping them from posting, it really doesn't work.

A really good website to use for this kind of thing is iidrn.com It has all the info on if a website is down or not, and you can report issues on there.

I've found this website extremely helpful in solving these kinds of issues.

[Frisbeeteria]

Both forum posts and Getting Help Reports are handled by mods, so it really doesn't matter which method is used - it will only go to an active mod. Given our geographic distribution, there is almost always an active mod around, even if they're not actively modding. So events like the forum outage were quickly and obviously apparent to the moderation team.

The mods have ways of reaching the admins, but there are really only two active admins at the moment. Ballotonia saw the outage, checked his access, and found he couldn't even log in to reboot. The only admin who can deal with host-side errors (which I believe this was) is [violet], and frankly a short term forum outage is not something she needs to get up in the middle of the night to deal with. She'll see the mod email pretty much first thing upon waking, and is usually pretty quick to deal with it.

Nothing a player could have sent would have been received any earlier. The only thing that would have sped things up would have been a middle of the night international phone call, and I'm not going to be the one making that call. No money was lost. No one was injured. Nothing bad happened except you couldn't chat with your online pals for a few hours.

I'm not seeing anything that needs fixing.