Well, I don't know very much about the technical aspects of the Internet, but I wanted to share one observation and the idea resulting from it: I switched to the opera browser a couple of days ago which has got one nice feature; it displays in a very detailed way every action while loading a page. Over the last couple of days I have thus been noticing that the loading of a page here very often goes very smoothly until images hosted by certain external sites, above all Angelfire.com, have to be loaded, then the whole process slows down considerably, stalls or even times out. So, wouldn't it make sense to just identify such problematic external sites and ban any images hosted there from the forum ? I'd nominate Angelfire.com as the first of these sites.
As my own little cow in my signature was hosted by Angelfire, I have already gone ahead and brought it to the slaughterhouse.
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So long !
R³ - proud to be the official spokesman for the most noble Lady Bilqis, Desert Rose of Ironworks
Btw, the cow is queuing in the slaughterhouse right now !