Hour of the Dead

[ptbrown]

Should there be an HotD? A time (UTC) during which no clacks messages may be sent.

[madbobmcjim]

Yeah definitely :-)

I don't think the protocol should be enforcing an HotD, but as it's an interconnection into or out of a Clacks network, and different Clacks networks might be running different HotDs, maybe a HotD-delivery-failed header response and the User-Agent should try again later? Or allow for buffering the requests at the edge of the network to be transmitted post HotD (with appropriate HotD-delivery-delayed response header)

[ptbrown]

503 Service Unavailable. This looks like the correct response. As you say each external network will have its own HotD. We can say that conforming CoHTTP gateways SHOULD send Retry-After but they're still allowed to refuse connections.