Thanks for the feedback on the thread folks - a real pleasure to see so much positive effort being put into a quite justifiable gripe thread.
I'm just back in from an overnight middle eastern trip but I had managed to discuss some of your thoughts with Danny before leaving. Our respective posting times consistently show how we squeeze time into the site - yawn.
The IT folks have given us a lot to think about - a completely different strategy if you like for providing the site for you. The server has been a regular crisis ever since we started and we just kept stepping up through shared servers until we ended up with our own. There have also been times when we've popped ads on a seperate server to offload the main one. It's been a constant diet of growing pains.
At last you at least have some idea of the scale and costs we face - not to ask you for money but explain the periods of poor service while we raise the funds for each upgrade. We aren't corporate but I think the professionals have managed to indicate we really are facing the costs and decisions that a significant company faces. And as drauk points out so succinctly he doesn't know anyone working on this scale providing a free service.
And finally sleep beckons, well fleetingly now that Danny has let me find out the hard way we're nudging the 500 gigabytes of bandwidth per month mark
Regards to all,
Rob Lloyd
PS Polling is switched off over most of the site at the moment Flyin'Dutch'. We consider it to be mainly eye candy and we play around with these things to see whats adds to load on the server and what's insignificant. There are hundreds of these bells, whistles and add ons that prettify a site with few (in our terms) visitors. A gruesome thread with huge numbers of requests to BRL and threats of violence might get it switched on for a trial period on this forum
