@3D_Fab_Team … Dwight (@denzuko) has made a generous offer… Please review and and possibly consider discussing the pros & cons during the meeting this Friday… 
https://talk.dallasmakerspace.org/t/issue-righty-polyprinter-malfunction/13193/12?u=lisaselk
Cross-posting my response to this thread to continue the subject here… 
yeah, lets get a notification use case up on the wiki then I’ll start coding from there. As for any work at the moment I’m thinking just doing a simple cronjob that pulls the printer status to check if its offline and after 30 minutes send a notification upstream.
That’s definitely a good (and reasonably safe) start… Be sure to exclude Midnight & Mendy (for now anyway - until they get their own network cables lol). How difficult would it be to limit the notifications? As in, let’s say that a printer is being taken out of service intentionally (for repair, etc…). If a notice is sent every 30 minutes, I can see the team quickly filtering out the notifications… Maybe max notifications per printer at once every (6, 12, or even 24 hours)?
Cronjobs can be setup to run at any time so its easy enough to setup a job that runs 6/12/24 or how ever else one would like.
One can also set a flag value in the printers.php which then be use to put a printer into “maintenance mode” so that an admin could first set the flag value in printers.php then preform any maintenance and when completed reset the flag to active.
How difficult would it be to create a link where the 3D Fab volunteers can just “click” a shortcut to a script (or select an option in a drop down on the Octoprint page) to toggle “maintenance mode” on/off? Many of the members who volunteer to fix the printers are not “into” programming at all, so they would not be likely to try to keep it up to date. However, if there was a simple “toggle” via a shortcut to a script on their desktop and/or an option added to the drop-down menu in Octoprint, then it might actually get used…
It may end up being another night of coding both the db and interface but overall I had already thought of that feature and have a good deal of things in place after all that refactoring I did, so its now a lot easier than one thinks to add features like this one.