We need to start announcing when there will be server downtime. It doesn't take more than a passing glance of the IW4M forum section to see that when such necessities do arise, the community is left confused and, as a result, mass spam occurs with players demanding answers...

 

I'm not bringing this up because I'm intent on satiating the irate passions of impatient nooblets so much as I am just trying to save my fellow global moderators and myself included an easier time cleaning up the post-shutdown mess the next time such actions take effect.

 

I was curious to find out if this would be at all possible. I could take up the duty of relaying a shutdown warning to the community beforehand.

Afaik, there shouldn't be any server downtimes, NTAuthority has a master server restarting script for that.

 

It failed to function for the last server downtime though, that's why.

Intentional downtime is announced beforehand, but with the NP server not blatantly crashing anymore it now keeps on hanging every ~24 hours.

Ah okay. I had never noticed such warnings before a shutdown so I wasn't aware they occur. And right, of course we can't announce unplanned downtime. For that, I'll just make sure to keep the complaints to a minimum and expedite the process of informing the community of whats going on, maybe a temporarily stickied topic just saying (in a nutshell) "Sorry, the master server is down. Please be patient, don't spam the boards about it."