The last few days have been unpleasant and full of rancor. New owners trying and failing to load OS2008 and applications from the repositories, asking why and getting abuse from the old stalwarts for not searching first. Everybody is unhappy.

It would be nice if Nokia and Maemo maintained a status notice on their front pages whenever the sites are experiencing problems - but they don't so would it be possible to add a very prominent status area to the front-page of ITT and keep that up to date with the state of the download sites?

When things are bad then the notice could contain a link to a single thread that should be used to discuss the current status. It would be nice if most of the time this status message basically said that all engines were running normally. But when things go pear-shaped then folks would know where to look for assurance that it is not just their tablet that is behaving badly. New owners would see this notice the first time they visit ITT. It also might motivate Nokia to get their house in order.

I think that there is going to be a whole lot of new owners show up on on Christmas day this year, so even a once-off message right now would save some grief.