Personally, I thought the placeholder page was considerably worse than a generic server error page. It did nothing to ease my mind with regard to the possibility that the site had been hacked. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Since there was no other communication forthcoming from anyone at Pair or any of the site admins, all I could do was idly hope that things were no worse than in fact they turned out to be.

I suppose I could have emailed tye or someone whose email address I happen to have, on the hopes that they might know something...

I did manage to hail Petruchio on another channel, but he avowed ignorance of the situation.

I posted a message on the PerlMonks facebook group wall, thinking maybe someone who knew something would reply. Alas, that was fruitless as well.

I think there should a be a defined "emergency plan" for keeping the monks informed in the event of future similar occurrences. As a first rough cut, I'd recommend that one or more of the following be done, in this order of preference:

1. Put up a real, meaningful placeholder page which is both informative and reassuring.
2. Send a broadcast message to all of the email addresses of record.
3. Post messages on other sites of the Perl community — particularly those which point to PerlMonks as a community site. One obvious choice is use.perl.

At the very least, situation status updates should be communicated poste haste to all gods so that they may respond usefully when queried by monks who may happen to contact them. The expectation that any given god would know what's going on is, I think, not unreasonable.

Thank you.