People have put forward the idea of an alternate BBS to be able to have info when HTC (or should I say its ISP or phone company) goes 'tits-up' (pardon my french).
If this alternate board is only used during those 'emergencies', not much people will know the address so it won't be much useful. AGW has a lot of success 'thanks' to the BS explanations of iEN on their own board about some issues, and the resulting ban of some users who denounced this BS on the said board. So most users went to AGW to have some free speech.
IMO, HTC has never used BS to cover their problems, so an alternate BBS isn't necessary for us.
OTOH, people have asked to be informed by mail when HTC was unreachable. Skuzzy told us that it wouldn't be adequate.
I've had this idea: let's say that HTC rents some cheap webspace (a few MBs are more than enough) on a distant server economically, technically and geographically independent from HTC's network. There, a simple text message could be uploaded when everything goes under.
On the client side of AH, a 'Why can't I connect?' button would be added on the very first page. Clicking on this button would download the small text file on the distant webserver and let it appear in a pop-up screen (like the MOTD).
If everything is fine, it could say i.e. 'AH server is running normally'. But when HTC is completely unreachable, they could use it to let us know what is going on.
So one would immediately know if his connection problems are caused at HTC or somewhere else on the net. And nobody would experience what Hazed lived: HTC went down just after he had made some serious changes to his computer configuration. He believed for a while that the problems were on his side and grinded his teeth to the roots
