Judge downtime protection ideas

DPjudgesters --

As you guys know (in some cases painfully), the DPjudge doesn't currently
detect the end of an outage, which means that unintentional CD's (another
reason I hate the rule) and player dismissals often happen when the judge
comes back up after it's taken a hit.

Well, I was thinking that for the still-in-test next version of the DPjudge,
once floc.net gets back this time, I might try to put in some downtime
protection.  Here's the thoughts, which I'd like comment on:

1.  When the job that processes games runs, it will detect when the LAST
time it ran was, and if that time is more than X ago (suggestions for X?
Two hours?  Twelve hours?  How long constitutes an "outage"?), it will
consider an outage to have occurred.

2.  For those games being processed in the run just after "an outage has
occurred", if the game would process under CD, or would dismiss any players
for missing the deadline, rather than doing so, the deadline will be
extended automatically to the current date-time plus Y (suggestions for Y?
One "movement phase deadline" length?)

3.  All other games would process as normal.  Question:  is this
insufficient?  Should ALL games get their deadlines extended so that a game
that might happen to have its deadline only an hour after the judge is
restored to service don't get the shaft during an upcoming processing-run?
Perhaps the treatment should be given to all games having a deadline during
the upcoming 24 hours or anytime before??

Comments?

Manus