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Once in a while it happens that I want to open a question from the main page and once I click it I get to Offline for maintenance page. Usually that's because there'a a temporary overload and the problem would not occur if I tried to open the same question for the second time. The problem is I can't conveniently ask the browser to open that question again - I'll have to go back to the main page and try to open it once again.

It sometimes happens I scroll through the main page and click "open in new tab" for questions I find interesting. If that happens during a brief outage I get to "offline for maintenance" for each and have to reopen each of them. That's a major inconvenience.

"Offline for maintenance" should provide means to easily reopen the page I originally tried to open.

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Was thinking the exact same thing when SO was having some problems a couple of hours ago... I opened a few questions in a new tab and ignored that they returned the offline page. +1 –  Daniel Vassallo Oct 4 '10 at 9:57

2 Answers 2

up vote 11 down vote accepted


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Great. I'll accept this once I have a chance to try the implementation out. –  sharptooth Oct 5 '10 at 5:18
Just saw this after offline-time. Nice! –  Michael Petrotta Oct 5 '10 at 7:33
Geoff, will this also help with form posts, as in resubmitting all the form's data if this error comes up in response to a post? –  ErikE Oct 5 '10 at 23:48
Great. It works. –  sharptooth Oct 22 '10 at 6:52

We improved this further, now we don't change the URL (or redirect you at all). With some <iframe> trickery to show the per-site error page (since the main error HTML is a static content-only load balancer) you can F5 to your heart's content.

Disclaimer: If you hold down F5 a temporary ban is auto-imposed by the load balancer, so don't go completely crazy.

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