Scheduled maintenance and what will be unavailable Writing it up because I had to work it out twice and would rather nobody else did.
Collecting what is known about scheduled maintenance in one place, because it is currently spread across a category, two tag pages and a thread that is hard to find.
This is a summary rather than new work, and I have attributed each part to where I found it.
One question about the transition rather than the policy: what happens to topics that are in flight when it takes effect? The announcement is clear about posts and silent about drafts.
I read the opening post twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.
I would put moderate confidence on the mainstream reading of scheduled maintenance and no more. That is not scepticism for its own sake; it is where the sourcing actually stops.
The opening post answers the question as asked. The question underneath it is different.
The question underneath scheduled maintenance is usually "how would I tell?" rather than "what is true?", and that one has a method attached to it.
Write down what you would expect to see under each hypothesis before you collect anything. If they predict the same observation, collecting it will not help.
The rare case here is the one that costs somebody a week, though, and the common case costs everyone ten seconds. I think the trade is clearly correct.
Scheduled maintenance: if the site is going offline for maintenance, advance notice will be posted here with the duration and scope.
Everything in post #5 holds. The case it does not cover is the one I have.
Where I have landed on scheduled maintenance, having got it wrong once in public: the direction is clear, the magnitude is not, and anyone quoting a precise magnitude has borrowed it from somewhere that did not measure it.
The reason scheduled maintenance is hard to answer is that the obvious measurement and the relevant quantity are not the same thing, and substituting one for the other is silent.
Scheduled maintenance notice. The site will be read-only for a short window; nothing will be lost and nothing needs doing at your end. If a post fails to submit during it, the draft survives.
Post #9 is the version of this I will quote in future. One addition.
What I would want before treating scheduled maintenance as settled: the method, the sample, and whether anyone tried to find the opposite result. Two of the three are usually missing.
The arithmetic in post #10 is right; the assumption feeding it is the part to check.
Worth saying publicly: stepping back cleanly and handing over is a service. Documents with an absent maintainer go wrong quietly, which is the worst way for them to go wrong.
Taking scheduled maintenance seriously for a moment rather than deflecting: the honest position is that the community has observations and no controlled comparison, and those two things support very different sentences.
Nothing to add, except that this is the answer I would give if asked.
Narrowing post #13, because the general version has more than one answer.
Staff announcements, policy changes, and scheduled maintenance. Read-only except for questions clarifying what was announced.
Everything in post #12 holds. The case it does not cover is the one I have.
Reading back through the scheduled maintenance threads from last year, the same three questions come up every time and only one of them has ever been answered properly. That seems like a documentation gap rather than a knowledge gap.
Scheduled maintenance is well covered in the tag pages, and the older discussions are better than the recent ones because they were argued out properly. Worth twenty minutes before adding to this one.
Thank you for announcing it in advance rather than after. The number of places that do the reverse is remarkable.
Written from notes rather than memory, which is why the numbers are specific.
On post #16 — agreed on the reasoning, with one qualification.
Answering the scheduled maintenance question as asked, then the question I think is meant. As asked: yes, with the qualification below. As meant: it depends on how the first measurement was taken.
The edit is clearer. For anyone arriving now, read the edited version — the confusion in the replies above is about wording that no longer exists.
This is where my knowledge stops and I would rather mark the edge than blur it.
Acknowledging rather than arguing. The reasoning holds as far as I can follow it.
Post #21 is right about the mechanism and I think understates the practical bit.
Worth saying publicly: stepping back cleanly and handing over is a service. Documents with an absent maintainer go wrong quietly, which is the worst way for them to go wrong.
The confident answers on scheduled maintenance and the well-sourced answers are not the same answers, which is the most useful thing I have learned reading this category.
Adding the boring version of scheduled maintenance, because the interesting version keeps getting posted and the boring one is usually right.
Check the ordinary explanations, in order, and stop when one of them accounts for what you are seeing. Most of the time the second one does.
Post #25 answers the question as asked. The question underneath it is different.
Worth separating scheduled maintenance as a question about the compound from scheduled maintenance as a question about the documentation. They get answered by different people and only one of them is answerable here.
That is consistent with mine, for whatever one more account is worth.