Hi All,

I wanted to give you all a head's up on some changes you will all be experiencing in the forums soon.  Earlier this month we were informed by our hosting company that were getting a bit too large for our server, in fact, we were the highest user on the server.  An immediate upgrade to a larger server was required, and a review of our site was in order to see where we could cut down on some things that are bandwidth hogs, and we came up with a couple things that will help us a lot.

While our photobase is a large contributor to our overall size, it is apparently not the bandwidth hog that other parts of the site are.  We discovered that the platform that hosts our forums itself was a large consumer of our resources, so we are switching to a "lighter" platform.  It will appear very similar to what we have now, it will just be a lot friendlier to our hosting company, and ultimately help cut down on costs in the long run.  We will also be eliminating and consolidating some of the little or underused boards.  We also had to look at what else made our forums so "heavy", and a big part of that was the ability to post photos in the threads.  Now...I like that ability myself, but we are going to eliminate that in favor of using remote photo hosting platforms such as Picasa (recommended) to link to any photos you want to post.

One more thing you will notice, will be the elimination of the FlightSim Screenshots gallery.  I know it's very popular among some of you, but in the overall picture we had to make a decision, and while I enjoyed it myself, it was underused and taking up space and bandwidth.  We will still have the FlightSim Discussion board, as that is used quite a bit.  We can set up a Sticky Topic for screenshots within, and you can post your flightsim shots via Picasa, Flikr, or similar sites.

This has nothing to do with our recent reformation of the site itself.  Our new front page and format is actually much less of a resource hog than our old one was.  It's just that as we continue to grow, we're going to need more space!

The look of the forums will change a bit, but the overall functionality won't be changing. But there will be changes, and I wanted you all to know ahead of time.  I'm not too good with explaining the technical aspects of why this is necessary, but I hope I was clear enough.  Feel free to post any questions or comments, and what I can't answer, I'm sure Mark can.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and thanks for all you do to make this site a cool place to hang out!

Best Always,

Chuck