Showing time of comic updated

[faerwain]

At the moment, the forum is shut down "for some hours" after the comic is updated, to deal with the comic traffic first.
The message tells about forum opened in "hopefully a few hours".
Now, would it be possible to show when the comic was actually updated?
If I could see the new comic is 6 hours old, I might try again after an hour, but if it apperead half an hour ago I wouldn't of course bother to look again until the evening.
This might also decrease the traffic of the people regularly trying to enter the forum again.

[Vonriel]

A better way to do it might be to simply show when the forums were shut down, if possible. This would take care of instances where the forums need to be brought down during the middle of the day/week on a non-updating day for maintenance, etc. I do my best to only check it once/hour when they're down, but sometimes I get a little overzealous unless I happened to know when the forums went down.

Anyway, my two cents.

[J_Muller]

This sounds like a good idea to me. Since you can input text to say what's going on, it should be easy for the mods to insert the time of shutdown into the message.

[durrem]

I don't think they're really micromanaging it to that extent. Last Thursday the forum was shut down all day, but the site only had problems in the morning (for me, California). I don't think they have someone monitoring the bandwidth, but more like, someone came home from work and turned on the forums again...

[Samiam303]

Well yes, but it would still help to know how recently they went down so you can know if it's obviously going to be a lot longer, not to bother with it.

[Rawhide]

You could always use the rss feed

[durrem]

The RSS feed is probably the reason for the slowdowns anyway heh

[Rawhide]

Indirectly, yeah. The rss feed isn't directly the problem, everyone just rushes on at once now to view and post about the new comic because they know about it pretty much as soon as its up.

[Shhalahr Windrider]

RSS feed -> another page to load. If I just came to the forum and get a message that says the forums are down for 'a few hours', it's nice to know what the frame of reference for that 'few hours' is without having to load another only slightly related page.

Plus that's contingent on the visitor having an RSS reader.

Also assumes they will apply that level of lateral thinking or have read this thread.

Plus, if this is standard practice everytime the forum goes down, it helps out with non-comic-related downtime.

[J_Muller]

Yeah, that sort of thing is contingent on the forum-goers:

1. Understanding what the heck an RSS feeder does anyway.
2. Bothering to set one up instead of just checking comic pages manually for updates.
3. Actually using the RSS feed for this site.

[Rawhide]

I'm not in charge of the comics, I'm just giving solutions based on what is already there.

[J_Muller]

I'm not suggesting that you say when the comic goes up. I'm just suggesting that, since the text displayed when you take the forums offline is obviously dynamic, you insert into the message the time at which you're doing it. Or, if it's not you that does it, RawBear.

[faerwain]

Yes, that still might be useful.

But thanks, Rawhide, using the RSS as an indicator is a good idea.
Well, in mine case it would be, as rss doesn't work with my pc. Like Office, Adobe or anything else that is more than going online, doing .txt or showing jpeg. :smallsigh: I guess I should really save the money for a new one...