[leesalminen]

We were pretty liberal with posting to our status. page for years and thought it was The Right Thing to do. I still do, to a point.

But, what ended up happening was a competitor who didn't have a status page at all would use our status page against us in the sales process. They just never mentioned their lack of a status page to compare to.

This was the same competitor who went 100% down for ~4 days during the busiest month of the year and only posted updates to a private Facebook group. There was data loss that was never publicly admitted to.

So, yeah, we implemented reasonable boundaries on what constitutes a post to the status page. We also adopted a new status page provider that let us get more granular with categorizing posts, and allowing users to subscribe to only "urgent" channels that pertain to them.

[lamontcg]

Before 2003-ish Amazon used to have a static "gonefishing" page on www.amazon.com that was manually triggered during outages. Due to newspaper reporters writing scripts that would detect the GF pages they were removed and the site was allowed to just spew 500s for whatever segment of critical pages was busted.