Page Loading

I don't mean to complain and I hope you take this as constructive criticism, but man are you guys in love with forum scripts or what? I've been a forum jockey for a long time and I'm finding this forum more and more annoying to visit due to the heavy scripting you use. Don't get me wrong, I really like your site and the information you bring to the public. I just feel that the forums format could use some tweaking (imho).

For example, I appreciate the idea behind the insta search when I type a topic to start a new thread, but its obtrusive and just plain annoying. I know it keeps stupid people from starting the same thread over and over but every time it injects the suggested threads onto the page it jumps me down the page, grrr. When I surf from home its not as noticeable because my laptop is fast but here at the office its up to 10 seconds every time you click on a link for the scripts to finish running. click wait click wait click wait click wait...argh! Mostly its because this computer is slow (business class PC) but both home and office have a high speed connection so your host's connection is good.

I know mods like to see who's online and what not but do you really need all these scripts running? Another example, every time a page loads I get to look at your TOS highlighted in yellow at the top of firefox, uh thanks guys but really is it that bad that you need to beat your users up to make sure they see that TOS link on every page load??? The mods here do a great job keeping users in line and following the forum rules, don't you think the TOS link is a bit on the overkill side?

I'm an old geek (all the way back to BBS days, figure around 18 years ago lol) so maybe I'm the only one that finds the heavy use of scripting annoying. I want to be clear, its your site you can run it how you want...I guess I'm just saying its just hard to enjoy your site with all these scripts trying to load every time I click a link. I'm a huge fan of keep it simple and I think you may get more users, or at least happier users, if you were to remove a few layers of scripts. Who knows, it may even save you a few bucks in hosting fees.

Not that its important but I've run game, web and mail servers for quite a few years so I'm speaking from some experience. I've built web sites/pages, written a variety of scripts, and even hosted forums just like these. I just thought I'd mention it so you don't think I'm just some yahoo with a puter

Anyway, thanks for your efforts and the resource you provide and I hope you take these criticisms as productive feedback.

Regards,

-Reby

 

My problem is partly the forum code/scripts and partly a slow computer (win2k pro) at my office. I have DSL at home and at the office so I do have broadband and not dial up (omg ppl still use dial up??!?). The home computers (lol, ok so I have a computer lab at home) are much faster than my office machine and I don't experience the issue there, its only at the office that its annoying.

When I load the index of the forum the page loads pretty fast then it stalls while loading the scripts at the very bottom of the page. I have these sections minimized but they still load data (even when shrunk/minimized) which stall out Firefox up to 30 seconds per page view. Even those load times would be reasonable for a heavy graphics site, but for a forum its a bit on the excessive side. This isn't really a fault per say, its cool to have additional features on forums, but they do affect performance of the forums which is why I brought this up.

I really appreciate you shutting off that TOS banner, the site is much easier on the eyes now.

Regards,

-Reby