Implement a mechanism to manage moratoria (?)

[tripu]

Echidna lets groups publish even during W3C moratoria.

Those (few, short) periods exist for good reasons. Even if publication is possible w/o human intervention now, I think Echidna should honour moratoria.

Implement a mechanism in Echidna that will understand those moratoria, blocking publication and returning meaningful results (errors) that will explain the situation to whoever tries to publish during one of those periods.

[deniak]

👍 we should have a way to close Echidna and prevent publications during a specific period.

[dontcallmedom]

-1 one of the benefit of automation is removing these moratoria; I can understand that some publications still require human interaction (e.g. for home page news), but I would let it up to the group/staff contact to determine what is more important (releasing a new draft soon vs getting it announced on the home page).

[deniak]

Agree for the moratoria. There's no need to block automated publications during TPAC, AC or Christmas, but in case of software maintenance/upgrades that would cause Echidna to fail, it can be useful.

[tripu]

I think this is a legal question, more than anything else.

Letting someone publish something while the team (specifically the webmaster) is known to be absent or otherwise busy for some reason means issues could stay unattended for days. “Issues” could be (bear with me here while I list some really extreme scenarios): something is published that includes offensive content or illegal content; an evil (or clumsy) editor leaves their software publishing their stuff over and over in an infinite loop; someone exploits a vulnerability in the publication system to gain access to other pieces or to bring services down…

Published documents bearing W3C's seal of approval, I think these hypothetical situations may have legal implications. And security-wise, it seems to me like a good idea to leave things switched off occasionally, during the time when there is less human intervention…

I thought that is why there were moratoria in the first place (apart from granting some time off to staff and the webmaster, of course).