It seems like all the nodes went offline and all interfaces to Steem (like steemit.com) got broken. Wouldn't it be a lot better if the nodes could continue serving content up until the "uncle block", and that the interfaces could issue a status message, something like "blockchain temporary frozen due to technical problems - posting and voting won't work"?
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imho, it maybe a lot more complicated than that, but yeah sure there could be more sophistication but that requires prioritization and surely more available quality resources and that will all happen in due time
It's not the first time the network freezes, and I believe it's not the last time either. As I see it, this is a major trust issue - all of a sudden, both busy, steemit, steempeak, eSteem, etc stops working - and people are even concerned that their steem funds may be lost.
I haven't studied the software, but it should not be a great problem to change the node behaviour from "shutdown" to "stop producing blocks and ignore all newly produced blocks".
Showing the end-users nice error messages explaining that the network has gone down into a "fail-safe read-only-mode while some technical problem is investigated" is of lesser importance, but that's a job done by busy.org, steemit.com, steempeak.com, eSteem, etc.
i'm with you, thanks, but your middle paragraph is imho not that simple or even sensible, because imho if a catastrophic error occurs (which did) NO activity should be allowed, ALL user activity should cease hence shutdown
In my opinion, no matter how catastrophic the error is, anyone ought to be allowed to inspect the historical blockchain, that includes browsing old articles and replies on sites like steemit.com, as well as checking the wallet. This is important for user confidence, and also for search engines, etc.
As no new blocks are produced, it will of course be impossible with any actions that are to be recorded in the blockchain, that includes placing orders on the internal market, voting, writing replies or posts, etc. Ideally some alert should be shown even before the reader considers voting on anything, but a generic "an error has occurred" when trying to vote on something should eventually suffice. I believe the latter is roughly how steemit.com works today if an action cannot be recorded in the blockchain for whatever reason; one gets some error message in red text.
agreed, it will possibly all happen when STEEMIT is declared out of beta and big investors allow for / deliver the needed quality resources - hopefully sooner than later!