When the site goes down, what's the underlying issue?

No one owes us any explanations, but I'm curious! What's the problem, and how do y'all fix it?

Frankly, I'm not sure. A lot of this stuff goes on behind the scenes, even for most of the Map Committee members. There are a very select few that have the ability to truly tinker with the site beyond managing things like maps/categories and league matches etc.

Perhaps there are others who understand the situation better than I do, but I'm not php savvy.

Does anyone know who fixes the site when it goes down?

This is pure speculation on my part, but based on the error messages, it seems that what really happens when the site crashes is that the code responsible for retrieving your game info from the server goes haywire, and so the "Your Games" page, "Your Turn Games", "Design Maps" - basically everything that requires the site to call up specific games / maps from storage breaks down.

The data remains intact, but your ability to retrieve it gets lost. It's a bit like losing the directions to your friend's house - the house is still there, but you don't know how to get there.

If you notice, the error messages seem to indicate SQL errors, which concerns the code that retrieves data from databases. Furthermore, you'll notice that if you have a map's permalink and type it in your URL, you can still load the map - because the hyperlink provides all the directions needed to retrieve the map from memory. Loading games, however, may not work, because the hyperlink doesn't indicate unit position, whether a particular unit has moved, whose turn it is, available funds or all the hundred other little things that have to be retrieved from memory when you play a game.

As I said though, this is pure speculation on my part since I've never seen the source code. If Walker or Mori could weigh in here, it'd be great