I guess a procedure for notifying users about possible longer outages could be put in place. Perhaps the default might be a message on the Thorn cycles website?
An idea well worth considering, Geo', as Thorn and SJSC's commercial sites were unaffected during the Forum outage.
There's a way I can email (Spam to Good Ends™) everyone who is a member using the Forum's Admin console, but of course that is not possible if the site is down.
All the best,
Dan.