Thanks for the 'bouquet', Mancunian... we get enough brickbats!

Yes, a forum community can become quite a big part of a person's life if they are a real enthusiast in a certain area. We see this very clearly sometimes in cases where someone is creating a bad atmosphere and we have to ban them. Some people get very upset and it's almost as if we've taken their family away.

Crash is right, it is the volume of spam we get from overseas that is causing problems, unbelievable amounts that have steadily built up over our years of operation. The actual member traffic shouldn't cause a problem even on our busiest days, as we do lease our own dedicated server.

We are currently researching whether a big injection of extra RAM might do the trick or whether it's best to just bite the bullet and lease a new, much more powerful server. The issue of how to address the problem should be resolved shortly and the changes effective within about a week.

Thanks for bringing the matter to our attention. We can just as easily suffer from "maybe my own computer is the problem" syndrome as you can, so member feedback is very useful.