Very, very slow loading today, particularly bad this evening with up to 30-seconds wait to get content displayed after border material appears. Using high-speed cable modem, so...

Congratulations, Randy. All is forgiven for the "slow posting" problems.

I'm guessing that the slowness of the site has more to do with how the newly-arrayed pages load on different computers. Reasonably fast on my office P4 with a T-3 line but slower-than-slow on my home Power Mac G3 with fast DSL. Unless it gets better, I have to revert to the PC for FT which is a hard sell for a Mac fan

For me the site has been a lot slower since the silly looking new Olive Oil and Popeye bar was added across top page along with the banner.

The new over-sized (and surely way too large?) addition does not seem to move or jump around, and should not affect speed, but that seems to be the only thing that changed.

I noticed in the past 10 minutes that those horrendously annoying emoticon smileys are apparently gone, (HURRRRRRAH!) so maybe we'll see a pick up in speed?

Man, I'm bummed, or maybe i should be happy. Oz, that's me and Olive Oil at the top of the page. Actually it's connected to the navigationbar and doesn't hang that much at all below the FT logo. The Web site speed was apparent before we loaded the new navigation bar on interior pages, so i think it is more related to the increase in traffic - yesterday was the third highest day ever for new members and the second highest day ever for user activity, All week long we've been hammered with peak traffic. While running some pretty good servers at FT, I'll look to see what we can do to tweak more performance or see what else is new for faster servers since it is likely the traffic will continue to grow on FT.

As for the cartoon characters - when we were in beta for a makeover for FT, we presented to a bunch of members of FT various prototypes for the new look - with and without the Olive Oil graphics and what you see was overwhelmingly the choice of those members (I think about 50 of them at random, long time members, international, US and Canada and even members we picked from new enrollees with us only for less than a month but with several posts, etc) who agreed to test things.

We've gotten a lot of positive feedback from the new front page so let's get used to this and see what the feed back is over time.

Thanks for the observing eye. Now, don't you think the popeye guy looks more like me? HA! Happy New Year.

Still very slow this morning here.

The old problem has returned for me the last couple of days. FlyerTalk sailing smoothly along, punctuated by occasional 3 minute periods of complete non-activity about once every 20-30 minutes.

Just keeps stalling and then restarting for me. When it's not stalled, it works fine.

Regarding the top bar, I think it is an excellent idea to have a consistent navigation structure that integrates the content pages and the forum (I believe a certain someone, probably among many others, might have suggested that in the past, actually ).

However, I would suggest to perhaps have a look into how the different elements could be integrated a bit differently from a design perspective - right now, the top banner, the side banner, the navigation bar and the forum elements look disintegrated on a standard 1024 x 768 screen. This could probably be adjusted with a relatively small effort in terms of redesign. Just my 0.000002 cents . Also, I am not sure if the navigation bar is already 100 % optimized in terms of being "light" (kb) - the different images and elements combined do add up to a few kb.

Randy C'mon even YOU have more hair than that Popeye character.

Great to hear the front page is getting such a good rap - my comment (and others) is why does each internal page need a large FT graphic (as well as paid banner) that takes up most of the screen, when less deep sized navigation tabs worked fine before?

Still very slow today for me, to echo last few posts of Premex and Chuck.

I am not technical minded at all, but do wonder if those smiley/emoticon flash banners are slowing things? You may recall there was a huge sized banner a year or so back that many reported slowing things. When Dan/Mikel got rid of it, reports were things sped up for many users.

Those smileys (apart from being incredibly irritating) seem to take over the screen, and even when you navigate to send an email to members, or similar off board stuff, seem to 'overhang' that page, so I have Little doubt there is a VERY large amount of graphics and code in them compared to the more usual static banners.

If the ad company is paying you many times more than usual for the smileys, and that pays the bills ...... more power to you. But if they are only paying regular rates can someone PLEEZE ask for a change of scenery?

Dan/Randy/John,

My experience mirrors PremEx's. Right now again it's taking 30-60 seconds to open any page and that long to post too.

Is there something sporadic in your servers that slows things down somehow?

This site has become very annoying with all the pop up crap on it and those stupid smileys. It is running so slow now it hardly makes it worthwhile visiting as you end up totally wound up at the end.

Makes we wonder who and why, put those pathetic adverts in place.

I have no problem with "olive oil" or "popeye"; I like the short cuts on the navigation bar being available.

It's the flash ads that are slowing the pages down.

The web scripts being loaded for each page, while large, run ok.

I'll use the navigation bar as an example. Without setting the Flash Quality on Each of the adverts to low, If I "mouse over" to, say, "Extras" it takes up to 2 seconds for the 11 options from "blogs @..." to "Town Hall" to appear. After setting the adverts to low quality, the same menu appears in less than half a second.

The same for most other screen activities. It's really most noticable when editing a post. Click the Quote Icon and wait for the disolg box to appear. Sometime, quite often there is a noticable time lag with even simple keystrokes.

I've taken to using Flyer Talk Archives (AKA FT Lite) to get around the problem; but this really is not the solution.

As I wrote in a related post, I will not be using any of these 'smileys' as these ads simply have a negative impact on me.

Agree. Lots on FT simply lurk and browse so it may not impact them.

Those that actually post and edit seem to ber getting slowed up most from my experience, and it does seem to co-incide with the Smiley Emoticon flash ads being on line.

Try using the Firefox Browser (www.mozilla.org) and install the ....... plugin. Then just right click on any ad or image you don't want to see and it's gone. For good.

I really thought ....... was just something for geeks, but it really is a great and simple to use program for firefox.

https://addons.update.mozilla.org/ex...=Windows&id=10