Whether it's a small bar on the top of the site informing users that the site will be down at 5pm EST until 7pm EST, or is likely to go down at that time, an "alert" that pops up upon opening the site etc, let users know when the site is going down.
People keep losing article work, edits aren't being sent in, etc, just let users know the time to not use the features, until the site is 100% up, rather than dropping out
I and many others appreciate that the site is having further work done but it would just be nice to know when not to pour in time into the edits and such and do it at a later time