Right now we have no effective method of alerting people using the site to changes on the site which will affect them, e.g. server updates with downtime, things that will affect sessions, the IA's planned maintenance. We have the blog and Twitter but those are too removed from the site and many users never read them at all.

Ideally we'd have a way to display a banner (similar to the beta one, but with different CSS so that it's more eye-catching) which users can close/hide once they've read it. There also needs to be some sort of admin interface for adding/editing/removing the message.

e.g. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1 is currently showing a banner about changes to their privacy policy. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia is currently showing a banner about taking photos of monuments.

Edit: We added a basic banner in MBS-6402, but it needs to be more noticeable (more colour would help), dismissable by the user and easier to edit (e.g. there's a misspelling in the current message)