Hang on, lets not get too carried away trying to solve a problem we don't understand yet! Sheesh!

My personal opinion, and I'm happy to be proven wrong if it means this gets solved quicker, is that I don't believe that the website traffic volume is creating the issue. I have two other theories but until I can get some sort of corroboration out of the logs or stats I won't know if they're accurate or not.

And if it was the website itself causing the issue, how do we know whether it's the front end and not the back end?

Bit of a trap for young players I've found whilst consulting for myself ... don't try and solve the problem before you have all the information, the client generally knows enough to know they haven't given you that yet ;)

Can Iask how come other forums, say VD with something like 1000 registered people on-line let alone "guests" and pretty much every option enabled (seach is disabled during peak hours) i.e. avatars, signatures etc they rarely have an issue?

Exactly Henners.... as has previously been stated for members (paid up members) further afield this is usually their only form of contact with other members, and they are disappearing fast looking at various comments (ScottyB and DCR to name 2 off the top of my head)

If you and Ian stopped posting then the bandwith would HALF Im sure :D:D:D;);)

All that electrickery jargon rubbish is doing my head in! Why don't you just get the hamster a smaller wheel to run in, then each of his steps will give a greater change of arc so he'd get more turns of the dynamo with each step! Does anybody know what gearing he's running and we may be able to optimise that as well! Easy when you know how innit :biaggi:

Its GREAT to see some constructive and helpful comments like Ali's for a change.

I certainly know I'm getting tired of reading anything unhelpful / negative, especially given that the IT are obviously working hard behind the scenes.

I think you are being harsh there Frank. There's been plenty of constructive comments out there.

As Weeksy said - turn off all the eye-candy and you go a good way to reducing load on the server.

Sorry about that!!! I'm just getting abit tried of all the knocking going on.

I cant imagine how hard it must be trying to look after a few thousand 'member' and tens of thousands of posts.....I get a bad enough time trying to look after our wifi network for my wife and daughter...or maybe thats worse :lol::lol::lol:

Cheers - Frank

However, investigation shows that the "eye candy" is not the problem.

Did or didn't Ali say:

"Forcing people to host their avatars elsewhere would remove a large chunk of the traffic."

That's eye candy, isn't it?