Immediate transfer to a working admin site if the admin site connected to a Buoy signal is down. about buoy

[fabacab]

You'll need to elaborate on this; I don't understand what you mean. :/

[fabacab]

If an admin is hosting Buoy, and one of their registered Buoy users attempts to activate an alert, what will happen? If the crisis signal will not work, is it possible for an admin site to be set so that, in the event it goes down, its Buoy users can automatically be redirected to a working admin? Am I off here? If I'm not understanding an element let me know. Thanks

[fabacab]

Ah, no, you're not off. You understand it correctly.

This situation is one reason why it's beneficial for there to be many different "buoys" (different web sites on which the Buoy software is installed and runs). If one site is down, a different one may not be. Right now, all Buoy sites are independent of each other, that is, the site itself doesn't know what other sites are running Buoy. This also means it's not possible to redirect users to a different Buoy site. There would also be some obvious issues with privacy if we were to federate information from one Buoy install to a different one, even if only to redirect users to different sites, because it means sites the user may not trust suddenly gain access to information about them (such as their location).

So I think that for now, and possibly also into the future, the better way to address this is to encourage many different sites to install Buoy. If that happened, a single human user could create a user account on as many Buoy sites as they want. If they try to access one site and it doesn't load because it's down or whatever, the user can try a second site, and so on. To make this process easier, a native shell app can act as a multiplexer (the same way the Twitter app on your smartphone can be logged into more than one Twitter account at the same time), so that a user simply has to tell their app what accounts they have and the app can then communicate to any number of Buoy sites simultaneously.

To further improve this feature's usability, we could create a simple export/import format for data like response teams that a user could move from one site to another site, making it easy for a single person to independently manage multiple Buoy accounts.

Each of those idea could/should become their own issue threads, though, and I think that's all work that's pretty far into the future anyway because it depends on there actually being multiple independent installations of Buoy in the first place. Our focus should still be on encouraging as many different orgs/groups/admins as possible to install the Buoy software on their WordPress-powered websites so there can actually be many "buoys" on the Internet, rather than just one big one.