[bid_em_up]

Fred/Uday,

When BBO is unavailable due to maintenance, can you change the message that a user receives when they attempt to login?

Currently, you get the "Login Failed, please make certain you are connected to the internet" message when BBO is undergoing maintenance. If possible, I think it would be better if BBO is undergoing maintenance, that the user would receive a message that said "BBO is currently unavailable due to maintenance, please try again later".

Thanks.

[uday]

I can't think of an easy way to do this. When all the boxes are out, there is no one to respond to the client.

The message we see today really means

"I tried to connect to bbo.bridgebase.com and for any one of a number of reasons, the connection attempt failed. Perhaps BBO itself is off the air. Perhaps your ISP, your PC or your DNS is not working properly. Perhaps your firewall is blocking the attempt to connect, so that we can't tell if BBO is available. "

maybe we could do something that explains why the failure occured, and maybe we could guess from that and some additional diagnostics what happened but it would be a lot of work for relatively little gain. Big outages like this are extremely rare, perhaps once a year if that. Our isp understands our need to be up 24/7 and they only do this when they absolutely must.

[Gerardo]

Problem is, client doesn't know what's going on, beyond "I can't connect".
Maybe putting a webpage with more info (or, better put, extending the help page there with status info), but in most cases, it would be unreachable too.

We provided a lobby news detailing when the outage would be, and for how long (as usual), and made several announcements before the outage stating the same (also as usual).

This one was unusually long because there was some unusual needs, but it was stated so upfront.

[bid_em_up]

Ok, was worth a try.

All I knew was I had not been on BBO all day long, I finally go to sign in at approximately 2 am and couldnt connect.

Announcements in lobby or news are all fine and dandy, but they are dependent on the fact that you have logged in at some point in time that day to actually see them. I hadnt.

[Gerben42]

Quote

All I knew was I had not been on BBO all day long, I finally go to sign in at approximately 2 am and couldnt connect.

Must have been horrible, a whole day without BBO. Addicted?

But I agree there is no real way for BBO to send a message that they are offline if they are well... offline.

[barmar]

If it's a planned outage, they could have a backup machine whose only job is to respond to the connection requests and send back a maintenance message.

[bid_em_up]

barmar, on Nov 10 2006, 09:16 PM, said:

If it's a planned outage, they could have a backup machine whose only job is to respond to the connection requests and send back a maintenance message.

Thats kinda what I was thinking....except it appears from uday's post that it was not actually BBO that was undergoing maintenance, but instead their ISP. If you have no ISP, you have no way of connecting a second machine....(unless you have an alternate ISP).

Another possibility might be to ping another site (say microsoft.com) and see if you (BBO) gets a response. If you do, then issue message stating that BBO is currently down, try again later.