Blocking sites for many days at once

Using the right-click function to make sites unavailable one day at a time is handy for blocking out sites for a few days for maintenance, but not for blocking out lots of sites for extended periods.

To make one or many sites unavailable for many days, there's a quicker way and a quickest way, depending on how adept you are at copy/paste.

The quicker way is to go into Site Details for one site, and enter the date range in "Special dates unavailable", like: 11/23/05 to 12/9/05.  (If there are already dates in that field, just add this to the end with a comma separating it.)  If you need to do multiple sites, then highlight that text and copy it (Ctrl-C).  Click the Next button to get to the next site, then paste the text in that field (Ctrl-V).  Repeat for each site needed.

The quickest way, assuming this is the only date range of interest (e.g. the dates unavailable will be the same for each site) is to use the Raw Data Tables for Sites.  (Go to Maintenance / Raw Data Tables / Sites, and then select "Allow editing of fields" to enable editing.)

Enter the date range in the "Dates Unavail" column for one site, copy that text, then select that field for all necessary sites (e.g. the entire column), and then Ctrl-V to paste.  It will paste the dates into all selected cells. However, there is no "undo" or "cancel" on this -- we don't recommend trying it in your database without making sure you have a current backup.

Note: The fields (rows) that you paste into must be contiguous -- if there are any gaps in the selected area to be pastes, the program will lock up.  This is a newly discovered bug that will be fixed in the next release (after 3.6).