How to show "Out of Order" or "Under Maintenance" message to non-admin users?

Hello,

I'm managing several Ender 3 printers at a school, with a dedicated OctoPrint instance for each printer. Sometimes they break (as expected when rough-hanlded by kids). Is there a plugin (or a built-in way) to show a big "Out of Order" message when non-admin users login and try to print something?

I tried the "Sticky Notes" plugin, but it is hidden by default. Users need to click on its icon to expand the window and view the message.

Thanks!

I don't think such a thing currently exists. You could use something like the DryRun plugin, in which you activate that and it puts a big header that says it is in dry run mode.

Or maybe the Header announcement PlugIn would work. It would show for everyone including Admins but it would be hard to miss. I would think that would be ok for an admin to work around.

This is a good use case for that plugin. I took a quick peek and it definitely doesn't have any admin related permissions for display, so should show for all users once a message has been added by an admin.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. The "Header Announcements" plugin is very close to what I needed.

Note for future readers:
If you ever worked with kids (or any users, for that matter), you know how easy it is to ignore polite warnings on screen and continue working as if nothing happened.

The "Header Announcements" plugin allows only minimal formatting (<b> and <i> HTML tags are the only ones I got working), and this results in a dull looking message that's easily ignored.

So adding the CustomCSS plugin, and adding the following CSS makes the message un-escapable...

p#header_announcement_msg {
  font-size: 300% ;
  line-height: 1.5em;
  padding: 3em 1em;
}
p#header_announcement_msg i {
  display: block;
  margin-top: 1em;
}

Result:

(Hack alert: I hijacked the <i> html tag to make it behave as a line-break, since it is allowed by the "Header Announcements" plugin.)

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