Comment by ndriscoll
2 hours ago
Is it very important that they have someone to restore service at 3am? This isn't a hospital here; it's more like a library. My library is closed at 3am every day!
2 hours ago
Is it very important that they have someone to restore service at 3am? This isn't a hospital here; it's more like a library. My library is closed at 3am every day!
> Is it very important that they have someone to restore service at 3am?
Depends on the service, but any effort to maintain this daft "gosh, what are they worried about, it's just the internet archive" line of thought is going to depend on either trivializing the needs of their staff, their users, or their computer systems. Good on them for taking things more seriously.
(3:00 AM on the west coast is work hours for some of their volunteers, users, and contributors across the globe)
> My library is closed at 3am every day!
A library will have IT staff on call. Staff need their computers to work when they come in in the morning, users need the infrastructure working in order to do pretty much anything - and why the hell shouldn't people be able to use an online borrowing service in the middle of the night?
Ok how about 6am? 7pm?
The point is that someone needs to bring the service back up and they can't rely on volunteers to do it whenever they feel like it.
My local library isn't open at 6am either (opens at 9, or 10 on Sat and 1 on Sun), and closes before 7 on Fri-Sun.
> someone needs to
Do they though? Why is there some assumed urgency? What happens if they don't do it "whenever they feel like it" (e.g. normal hours)?
Computers also generally don't randomly just stop working, and if they did in this case (network engineer), it's almost certainly the ISP anyway.
Archive is likely one of the top traffic destinations on the internet. Your local library is likely not.
Maybe they want to hire someone full-time is so they don't have to have a policy of whenever they feel like it?
Having a reliable service is likely one of the reasons why their donors donate in the first place. Why do organizations and wealthy people still want to donate if the service goes down for 2 days and no one cares? Why would this kind of non-profit attract top volunteers in the first place?
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