Bluntly ...

[enquirer]

Take cover, incoming.

Too many live links, side bars, and fancy clutter. It's killing loading and extending refresh to the point where the site is becoming almost unusable. The site is becoming an end in itself. Too much fiddling for the sake of it.

Get rid of the animations and the fancy graphics. If there must be links to juvenile nonsense like Twatter, Prattbook and the like (less popular then hitherto, according to industry reports), put them somewhere where they don't interfere.

For members, set it up so that when logging in, stuff like the side bar vanishes. I have to spend far too much time shutting boxes and moving things around, just so I can see the basics.

The junk is strangling the site.

The poorer sections of society (those most likely to be in need of assistance), are unlikely to have access to the latest whizz-bang technology. Not everyone lives in an area where download speed exceeds that of a man on a donkey.

Let's get back to lean and mean.

[enaid]

Re: Bluntly ...

Your are entitled to your view and they are always welcome.
I think the point being with Face Book and Twitter is not to hit those who are possibly in the poorer or most needy end of our society, but to help and advise those that may become so before this happens.By this I mean the youngsters coming up who will have all the whizz bang technology no matter what, these are the ones who are next in line for a battering like we have had if they are not pre warned and pre armed.
My opinion on your views .
Enaid x

[Amethyst]

Re: Bluntly ...

Hiya, Sorry to hear you're having problems loading the site.

The new forum icons are the same size within a few kbs of the old ones (the speech bubbles) and operate in the same way thus the same number of queries ( new posts/old posts/locked etc) We have reduced a lot of the forums that were loading on the forum home page into subforums to bring the page size down some.

Twitter does sometimes slow things a little but it has been on the forum for years now.

Outward pointing links shouldn't affect things at all.

The images are all on our server rather than hotlinked (which slows stuff down as it relies on the hotlinked sites being up) - other than I think the TS ecrime and OFT ones (which needed coming off anyways). If you do spot any others shout as I can be a bugger for hotlinking sometimes.

One of the slowest things to load is the Advance Forum Statistics - otherwise known as the 'What's Happening?' box at the top of the forum home page, this can be removed permanently on individual user accounts (click the down arrow and select 'turn off top stats' - you can turn it on again in the Quick Links menu)

I'll run a couple reports and see what else could be slowing things up, I need to sort out some caching settings possibly as they may be a little short. Plus there are a couple of analytics things we could ditch - we had gostats but don't really find it very helpful and that seems to show up on page loads so may lose that.

If yours is loading particularly slow, keep an eye in the bottom left of the page when loading (on ff anyway) and see if it lags on anything particularly for you.

Can only try and help and I know how irritating it is when the circles just spinning and you're trying to get on with stuff.

xx

Sharon
xx


just to add: the facebook loading bitty is for facebook connect which is an integrated part of VB (so you can log in to LB with yur FB log in) but we have turned off (as basically I don't think people want to link their debt issues with their facebook accounts, somehow, and FB have enough of everyones personal info already)

[wales01man]

Re: Bluntly ...

At least we don't have adverts popping up all over the page trying to sell stuff you looked at on websites like Band Q and Argos

[enquirer]

Re: Bluntly ...

I fear that there's no escaping it - there is a direct correlation between decreasing speed and increasing junk. Every time the site has been 'improved' it's got slower.

[Amethyst]

Re: Bluntly ...

[EXC]

Re: Bluntly ...

I fear that there's no escaping it - there is a direct correlation between decreasing speed and increasing junk. Every time the site has been 'improved' it's got slower.

It loads fine for me.

[Amethyst]

Re: Bluntly ...

For comparison

[EXC]

Re: Bluntly ...

From Alexa http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/legalbeagles.info


How fast does legalbeagles.info load?


Average (1.88 Seconds), 58% of sites are faster.

[Amethyst]

Re: Bluntly ...

Aye, I don't think it's too bad considering we're not on the zoomiest server in the world.

[FlamingParrot]

Re: Bluntly ...

It loads fine for me.

No problems here either... :noidea: even though I don't live in a fiber optic area.
The social icons at the top are barely noticeable.

In this day and age, FB etc. is no longer for the youngsters, a lot of us who are not exactly spring chickens also have FB accounts and you don't need a lot of money to enjoy fancy graphics and animations, any internet-enabled device can display them these days. Those arguments would all have been valid some years ago, like when I started creating websites, you had to keep file sizes down to a bare minimum, etc. to allow for dial-up connections. The year was 2000. :grin:

[Guest]

Re: Bluntly ...

Oh yeah, there are linky things at the top of the page. :beagle2222:

Wonders of modern science.

[Amethyst]

Re: Bluntly ...

'mazin !

How do you know if you have fibre optic then?

We have cables of some sort, no idea what sort.

[FlamingParrot]

Re: Bluntly ...

How do you know if you have fibre optic then?

We have cables of some sort, no idea what sort.

BT were installing the cables a couple of years ago, but obviously the do the towns first. This is the page to check: http://www.superfast-openreach.co.uk/where-and-when/

[Tools]

Re: Bluntly ...

'mazin !

How do you know if you have fibre optic then?

We have cables of some sort, no idea what sort.

We have Virgin fibreoptic and the following speeds
45mb/s download
6mb/s upload

and that is with around 10 devices connected at any one time.