Talk:3141: Mantle Model

The wiki lives! 🥹 Caliban (talk) 21:04, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

So it wasn't just my computer that wouldn't show explain xkcd? BobcatInABox (talk) 21:35, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

Also: what went wrong and how did they fix it? BobcatInABox (talk) 21:35, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

And: do we have a plan in case it happens again? BobcatInABox (talk) 21:35, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

It was clearly a server-side issue. (Well, more server-side than Cloudflare, which still covers a lot of ground.( There are a number of different things that could have been wrong, from the server rack-space no longer being paid for (a potentially more permanent death than the domain not being paid for - which we know has been, anyway) to someone having been messing about with the site and caused fatally excessive parsing errors (there's no sign of that, in the page-edit history that we see, although there's always a potential for the person who got the server working 'sensibly' again to have purged the evidence along with the problem).

Could also have just been a temporary power-outage/blown-fuse in the apartment of the person who currently lets the server hum away in the background (if that's the server's physical location, which I doubt) or that person was moving it from one residence to another and so obviously had to unplug it, transport it and plug it back in again to power and network connection (again, from what I know, I doubt that... but it's not an impossible scenario).

Unless we get to hear from whoever fixed the problem, we can just keep on guessing.

Assuming that any actual person did fix the problem rather than (for yet another theory...) it being a connectivity issue further along the chain that just happened to catch our server in that, and was just sorted out as a more general restorating of service.

I had several 'likely' ideas during the downtime... Well, obvious they couldn't all be actually likely, as they were mutually exclusive to each other, but a larger share of the divided percentages than some of the more out-there ones... but very little proof of any of them, now we're up and running again. Not ruled out, but without the basic fingerprints that I'd have expected to support their realities. And some of my imagined solutions to the outage were situations where I would not actually have expected the site to return at all, too, and these have obviously been defied/subverted given that we're now talking here about this.

The good news (with reservations, at least) is that, the way we've been returned to 'normality', this raises the chances of this issue not being a recurring one. With a side-line chance of if whatever-it-was recurs, it'll be solved far quicker next time. Whoever/whatever we have to thank for it.

The bad news is that I don't think anyone 'active' has anything to do with it (please do let us know, if you did!). Either no direct hands-on fix at all, as described, or someone who really doesn't want to bother talking to us users and only steps/stepped in for a bit of quiet background fixing that nobody'll properly appreciate. (My kind of person, that, actually. I rather like it when I fix issues so that nobody besides my more immediate colleagues knows they've been fixed... although ideally I'd be doing so before anyone even knew they needed fixing. And this wasn't my work, of course. With so little access, or even familiarity with the basic setup, you'd have to look elsewhere for any mysterious house-elf who sorted this one out.)

TL;DR; - I don't know how to answer your question. I get the idea that nobody will answer your question as long as anyone who knows doesn't want to. I don't eventhink there's any possible plan that we can devise to deal with it. Even with an 'off-wiki' forum to talk amongst ourselves about things, the next time this happens again. Even if we could agree on where to go, it'd just end up being a legacy chatroom (like the Euphoria one) once the inevitable day comes when something means that this site goes dark and never lights up again. C'est la vie, etc... 92.17.62.87 00:28, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

La plume de la Terre est sous le bureau de mon oncle. BunsenH (talk) 21:33, 12 September 2025 (UTC)