I play with internet community software for a living, although we don't use InfoPop...

Bottom line here is that there is likely a scaleability issue on the message board, and it doesn't handle too large forums, such as United etc... hardware tweaks might get you a few inches here and there, but they won't get you over the finish line if the software doesn't scale.

So I don't wish to nor will I make this an ad for something we sell.. but there are highly scaleably message board solutions available and people who manage them. I know FT doesn't want to spend a fortune here either.

One of the most interesting non commercial solutions right now is a java based board called Jive.. it's open source, almost entirely free and very very scaleable. Sun are working on switching most of their boards to Jive based technology, as are several others.

There's always the more expensive commercial solutions, if you really want to spend $$ I can give you a list, but looking at this thread there's enough expertise out there to get things moving.

The second and more immeidately addressable area is how the community is structured. The issue of course is scaling... 2 general United boards isn't going to work, where would you look for information? What will work is breaking United and AA into smaller chunks that are topic specific... United Policies and Issues, United Flights and Aircraft, United MP Information and so on... I'm sure with a couple of hours of analysis every topic in United can be broken into a list of three or four general topics where people could clearly see where to post... suddenly you have a bunch of smaller forums that aren't overloading the limits of InfoPop, yet a structure the users can easily follow.

There are systems that can deal with this amount of traffic, eBay uses an external vendor with over 60,000 new posts a day (on their message boards, that's not the bidding system), CNN, HBO... I could go on, but there are plenty of sites handling bigger loads... at some point someone needs to "byte" the bullet (sorry couldn't resist) and decide to go forward with a scaleable replacement.

The choice of spending big $$ for a commercial grade solution and vendor or spending IT resources implementing something like Jive is one only Randy can dictate... but step one is to admit (at least internally if not to the users) that the current system is at the end of it's scaleability capability. The time to do that is now so you can put your resources into a solution that works, rather than spinning cycles trying to hold together something that's bursting at the seams.

Someone said buy InfoPops bigger setup for $80K... for the record $80K is over the top for a scaleable solution for the volume I suspect this board has (cheap for eBay, but WAY expensive for FT).

Anyway... the short term fix probably lies in topical sub forums for UAL and AA, longer term something that scales. So there's my 2 cents worth... at least here on FT it's 2 cents.

Let me know if you want any specific information, I've tried to stay general here and avoid advertising our products or anyone elses, because that's not what this board is about.