support for a different "experiment" content type

[anarcat]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
At the Tor project, we sometimes run large-scale experiments on the network that might affect the performance for some users. It's not an outage or an issue per se, but it's something we want our users to be aware of.

The current "outage" content type is not quite fitting for this.

Describe the solution you'd like
Instead, we have developed an in-house "experiment" content type. That is done with an overriden components.html layout and an extra experiments set of templates.

We'd like to merge this upstream: the components.html diff, in particular, is a problem for us as it's essentially a fork that is quite hard to track.

Describe alternatives you've considered
So far we've kept our changes to ourselves, thinking others might not be interested... But we're finding the cost of keeping the local diff a little high and figured other people might benefit from this as well...

Additional context

Would you be interested in a tentative PR to merge this back in?

See also #287 and our tracking issue in https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/status-site/-/issues/37.

[mistermantas]

Hi!

This use case does seem like it should be covered by informational posts, which can also be pinned, but are not "outage issues". Is there a reason why they are not being used?

[gk-tpo]

Hi!

This use case does seem like it should be covered by informational posts, which can also be pinned, but are not "outage issues". Is there a reason why they are not being used?

I think we struggled with that over in #189 a while back, which lead us to develop the solution @anarcat is proposing to upstream now. My memory is hazy but I can try to go over that older ticket and what we currently have and then get back to you for this ticket. I won't have time to do that in November, alas but might be able to squeeze this in before the Christmas break. How does that sound?

[mistermantas]

Hi!
This use case does seem like it should be covered by informational posts, which can also be pinned, but are not "outage issues". Is there a reason why they are not being used?

I think we struggled with that over in #189 a while back, which lead us to develop the solution @anarcat is proposing to upstream now. My memory is hazy but I can try to go over that older ticket and what we currently have and then get back to you for this ticket. I won't have time to do that in November, alas but might be able to squeeze this in before the Christmas break. How does that sound?

I am in no hurry at all, whenever you have the time is fine.