When the site is in maintenance mode, visitors used to see a bare "503" and a plain-text message. Not on-brand.
The maintenance page now mirrors the 404 page's CRT-frame + console-trace aesthetic, but with amber accents so it reads as "working on it" rather than "broken":
- Randomized retro status line: "DEFRAGMENTING SECTOR 0x00 — MS-DOS", "SYSOP AT CONSOLE — PCBOARD BBS", and 16 others drawn from MS-DOS / 1541 DOS / Amiga / CP/M / BBS / VMS / BSD / Minix history
- Spinning character + blinking cursor for motion
- Prominent "Message from the Sysop" block for the admin-configured maintenance message
- Auto-reload every 60 seconds so visitors bounce back into the live site the moment maintenance ends
- HTTP 503 +
Retry-After: 120header so Google and Bing come back later instead of de-indexing content
Ship-and-forget: once maintenance mode is toggled off in /admin/config, everything returns to normal automatically.
