I don't suppose that the web designers would be willing to drop by into this forum and let us know how they are doing on the various requests that have been put forward by the users?  I know that it is a horrible thing to have your work criticised, but I think that the users would appreciate knowing what is being done (if anything) about what they perceive as the flaws?  I know that I would! 

And I'm also interested in whether you coded this from scratch, or whether it is built up from a software package!  (I could try and search the page code, but it's much easier to ask for the answers!)

Kage

Well... now I know some of the reason the forums are so slow.

I'd know more if I could speak spanish, but a lot of the coding is the same regardless of language.

The site is loading ALL of the functions on every page load. Even when it's not needed. You don't need to verify age/other details EXCEPT on the page where they user is actually putting them in. If you've coded things right, your user can't be logged in without those things being verified. Loading all of those functions adds precious seconds to load time.

They are using an .htc file to make .PNG files work in IE 5. Admirable, except that anyone who is still using IE 5 is going to be on such an ancient piece of crap they're going to have ridiculous problems anyways (a machine that can't run the latest IE is going to take several minutes to load and display just ONE of these pages). A MUCH simpler solution would have been to just just .gif or .jpg images throughout. Sure there's a few fancy things you can do with .png files, but not enough to warrent saddling the majority of your users with extra load times.

As far as them reading the forums, remember it's all coded in Spanish, or some other crazy moon language I can't read, so chances are even if they do read the forums, they don't understand what we're saying.

So are we stuck with these crippling load times?

Luddite said:

I don't think we are, because even if there is inefficient code most of it could be faster with more power. I don't think the servers are dimensioned to the pressure put to them.

Oh dear.

Back to 60 seconds or more.  And roughly 1/3rd times out completely...

This really is not good.

In the absence of an official reply, which is understandable, I guess the answer is, "No, the web designers aren't willing to drop by and let us know what is happening."

Fair enough.

Kage