It is very good to see that WCG is now back up and running after prolonged (and, to many of us, entirely unexpected) systems maintenance.

But I have to wonder how many contributors were actually aware in advance that this prolonged downtime was actually planned and scheduled, rather than just yet another unfortunate extended outage, of which WCG has had sadly rather too many in its new-ish home?

I understand from the forums (now that they are online again) that apparently an announcement message was sent out in advance to graphical BOINC clients. That is welcome, but many contributors don't use the graphical client, and only run BOINC on 'headless' servers, and so don't ever see such messages.

Once it became clear that the infrastructure had indeed "mysteriously" fallen over (including the project website itself - oops) and didn't seem to be coming back after rather too many days, I had to dust off my old Twitter account to see if any sort of status update had maybe been posted. Oh, there actually had been, but I had to scroll past a long and now needlessly pinned post from April 2023(!), as well as a pointlessly self-indulgent promo post (incredibly tone-deaf timing given that the system was still entirely down - maybe wait until systems were non-SNAFU before spending time on ego-stroking?) before I could actually see the important status message! («the slowest of slow hand claps»)

New social networks

Many people now use Twitter (or Facebook) much less nowadays, or have even ceased using these platforms entirely, for various reasons.

Would it not be much more in the spirit of open science and genuine community for WCG to now have social network accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as, or maybe instead of, these other platforms (which have lost considerable numbers of users over the past couple of years)?

Can we get a commitment from WCG to do this as soon as possible?

Minimal website presence at all times

On becoming aware that there seemed to be an extended problem with WCG, naturally you would go to the website to see if there is any sort of status update message. But the website was also entirely offline! That's an absolutely embarrassing decision to have the website completely offline at the same time as back-end server maintenance was taking place.

If the front-end website and back-end systems are so tightly coupled together such that this is inevitable, that's an even more embarrassing technical decision, but I acknowledge that sometimes there are legacy technical decisions that we are stuck with.

But it would be a fairly trivial task, at the point that the main infrastructure gets powered down, to bring up a basic website on a server elsewhere and redirect the DNS record to point to the temporary site during the maintenance period, or, if there is at least some decoupling, to use web server redirects or proxying to display temporary status content from elsewhere.

Yes, it is good (but again, for many contributors, only known with hindsight once the forums were finally back online) that a project member hosted a status page on their own personal homepage, but it is completely unreasonable to expect contributors to even know of, let alone have already bookmarked, some cumbersome random homepage address (1995 and GeoCities called, and although we might have fond memories, that doesn't really hack it for present day expectations of Level of Service). Again, if that was really the best that could have been done (and the information there was adequate, if only you knew of it), it surely would not be beyond the reach of a competent server admin to redirect to that page with DNS and web redirects as needed?

Can we request that WCG sets up a hostname status.worldcommunitygrid.org, to point to a webserver hosted outside the main back-end data centre, that, dependent on circumstances, redirects to a formal status page on the main WCG site (when up), to keep contributors appraised of planned downtime, or to a personal homepage/status page during the times when the WCG site requires to be down or is otherwise experiencing problems?

Is really is quite embarrassing that what claims to be a large and well-resourced research institute, one which benefits greatly from the computing resources freely and generously given by WCG contributors, really seems incapable of expending the very small amount of work and effort needed to meet the minimum level of communications that one would expect from any sort of professional organisation.

I hope that these simple suggestions are received in the spirit intended, and wish WCG itself, and all contributors, all the best for the new year ahead and equal best wishes in helping to move scientific research forward this year, and, of course in future years!