I'll try to scrape up some cash but it will have to be after the holiday season. But, man...to be honest, I don't even know how many of us are even left to do any scraping. Even if all the people who are still willing to come here, scrape up a respectable amount, it probably wouldn't be enough to create a budget, would it? How much money is needed for an appropriate upgrade?

Hi everyone!

Yes, I'm still around, but, as noted by everyone here, the site is excruciatingly SLOW! As such, I barely check in anymore, which is sad, as I cut my "vintage" teeth with VDF! My two cents says it's simply the execution of the website/hosting service. The bottom line is that it takes $$$ to make things right. I'm on other forums every day, from drum related to hifi and stereo. Not a single one of those forums are slow...and some have been around for years! I honestly don't know what the answer is to these difficulties, short of a complete redesign from another host. I'll check in every now and then, but the slowness keeps me from responding to the vast majority of topics.

-Mark

Yes indeed … nothing is any better really. And again, through NO FAULT of David’s, and I know you all know that too. Another example of the slow page loading …

… I clicked on this thread to read the latest responses .. O-lugs , idrum4fun .. and it took .. literally .. 32 seconds for the page/thread to open. I timed it! THAT is just ridiculous and totally unacceptable. Then, to post this reply, another 28 seconds for the reply box to open! Good freaking grief! It’s just so frustrating. There is NO ANSWER OR FIX without additional funding, and that just isn’t going to happen despite the very nice and generous donations of those that have donated, and we THANK YOU ALL!!! But, nothing is going to happen/change without a major influx of cash/funding .. and .. David can’t possibly keep supplying the majority of jing it will take to fix it. So … like you all …

… we check in from time to time, but as a fully functioning forum, no … those days appear to be over. I’ve been here with David as the Super Moderator from the start … almost 20 years now … and it was a GREAT run too! Certainly not dead yet! … but kinda on life support. Sigh.

Tommyp

I don't know who is hosting this site but have you considered vBulletin Cloud. Looks pretty reasonable and if anyone should know how to host a bBulletion site properly, it should be vBulletin.

https://www.vbulletin.com/en/vbulletin-cloud

THANKS for the suggestion thin shell! David checks in regularly so he will see it for sure. THANKS!

Tommyp

I'm pretty confident it is not the server because we are on a beefed up VPN. I did look into the cloud options, which is the best for VB and a good idea for sure, but with the old forum infrastructure and coding it was not an option without losing the gallery. We hit the "damned if we do and the damned if we don't" aspect of the forum.

As you all may not remember we did upgrade to the newest and greatest VB way back when and that did not go over well! The look, the feel, the loss of the gallery and so on... not well received and we were asked by members to revert it back to the old way. So we did.

VB is a dying software that many sites migrated away from a long time ago, but we could not because of the gallery... That damn gallery was a "module" you could add on that was coded by an open source coder that did not stand the test of time. It was integrated in our database in such a way that upgrading did nothing more than cause issues.

This most recent adventure was to bring the forum at least to a more pleasant look, that fit Googles requirements for a responsive web site and a new server that was not shared like the last one. My 1st goal was to save the 125K photos. (which by far is probably the largest collection of photos on the Internet specific to vintage drums.) Then, also as a priority, was to secure the data and the "Question and Answers" that were already locked in history. That has and always will be why the forum is here. To help the people researching.

There was a catch 22 here. Site was improved, Google liked it more in searches and we got more traffic. Which sadly the older versions of coding and the way the forum is served to the end user, the site can't respond quick enough to the demand. This also brought in a lot of BOTS and other unwanted intrusions into our world. We use to hide in the back of the class and they basically left us alone. Now we moved up into the front of the class and here we are.

Yes, the guys I work with can update - improve and completely change the forum to a new platform! I have not been hit with the $$ yet. They do a lot for me for free and also support me for free in some instances. That is not to say I did not spend more than a G-note to get us here now.

David / Tommy,

Thanks for the update and the "behind the scenes" info...This will help the membership (including myself) to understand how we got to this point...Please let us know if there is anything we can do to help out...

Cheers

Thanks for the support everyone. This is direct from the team working on this web site.

Hi David, I just applied various adjustments over the days to address the slow speed. Please let me know if it's ok for you.

Josh

Still super slow... I see that there are currently 811 'viewers' on the site, which is highly suspect. So, then these are the bot's; what are they doing that takes up so much of the speed bandwidth, are they just parked idle or are scraping data or what???

… and a good question indeed! Despite our best efforts, there just doesn’t seem to be a way to battle/block those freaking things! And, it took me 90 seconds to get this post to open so I could respond. It’s absolutely maddening. SIGH.

Tommyp