Why is outage not reported on forum

[dcg]

Powweb SMTP email has been down all or most of the day today, 9/23/2009, at least in my time zone. Why is it not reported on the forum "Outages / Service Problems?" Granted there is a solitary posting on the OPS home page. But it was posted well after the outage and the posted schedule for fixing the problem has been missed. So why isn't the posting on the OPS home page (and a corresponding posting on the Outages forum) updated every half hour or so? When email is partly down for a whole day, some users must implement remedial action and could really use best information in order to plan activities.

[IanS]

Posting in the 'Outages' section is restricted to staff members, and for a long time the policy has been to post only in OPS. The 'Outages' section is a legacy section no longer used. The 'User reported...' section is where the problems are often highlighted first by regular users, who report their own difficulties - and it at least lets others know it is isn't a problem confined to their own account.

In this particular problem, e-mail, it was thought the issue was resolved and staff are working flat out on solving it.

[retro]

Posting in the 'Outages' section is restricted to staff members, and for a long time the policy has been to post only in OPS. The 'Outages' section is a legacy section no longer used.
...

There is something very wrong with this picture. The forum itself is still used, correct? It follows that a section of the forum titled "Announcements" and subtitled "Outages" should also still be used. If PowWeb has abandoned this, then a message to this effect should be the ONLY message seen in that section, and the section should ultimately be removed altogether. The current status of that section is misleading. Because it is near the top of the main page, it's where my eyes always first land when returning here in the midst of an outage.

[Autoload]

Subscribe to the system notices at:

http://www.powweb.com/support/index.bml?s=1

[Dbrazzell]

Subscribe to the system notices at:

http://www.powweb.com/support/index.bml?s=1

This is the better way to go.

Ideally I would post new threads in the outages area. However for this particular email issue. I wasn't really involved much and didnt know how big the outage was until several hours after it had been going on.

There is also a second issue where keeping the outages threads and the messages inside of the control panel synced can be a bit of a problem.

The control panel is the primary way of keeping users informed of outages. The forums an un official second. I will however try and do a better job of posting new threads in the outages forum.