Gabriel Wicke wrote: $wgSiteNotice isn't just used for fundraising. It's intended as a way developers can inform users about site-wide downtime. It's also displayed if there's a database connection error. That's why we have outage.php. It was accidentally used for a short time as a multi-lingual fundraising notice, and to that end I wrote a feature allowing the site notice to be drawn from a message. I made the message which it draws it from configurable, so that developers still have the ability to announce downtime. This is done with an initial colon in $wgSiteNotice, for example ":fundraising_notice". The reason it is "fundraising_notice" instead of "sitenotice" is so that users can translate a number of important messages developers might want to issue in advance, allowing a developer to select the one relevant to the occasion. Not only can they set it, but they don't have to clear the message cache when they do so. If I thought it was a good idea to replace $wgSiteNotice with wfMsg('sitenotice'), I would have done so, instead of writing something more complicated and more flexible. -- Tim Starling