as you know we have literally thousands of visitors a day (I reckon a thousand viewers for every poster) and many of them send me private e-mails instead of publicly posting.

Last week I got dozens of e-m's saying they could not access the board.

Chasing them up, they were all via AOL - but through an AOL link that did not apply to most British AOL users - predominantly US and Canadian ones (plus a couple in Mexico and one in Bahamas).

The connection was fixed in a day or so but drove those regulars mad.

Interestingly, some British AOL users that COULD get through found it took 30 seconds or so to load the site and a very long time to download photos.

I put many of them onto Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer - all of which are far faster than AOL which seems to have loads of problems at the moment.

I actually like AOL.
My bank, now a trendy wine bar.
My account.....switched!

I do often send videos and stuff to friends though who cannot open them in their browser, and I end up in the ridiculous situation of sticking stuff on Youtube so they can view it.
J? The board was down quite a lot last week for some reason and we had lesser access here as well.
I allways see this as a positive sign of a maxxed out server, but I think the major internet service providers are sometimes to blame.
We did a major e-bay kitchen shopping search yesterday, and aol crashed 4 times, notably on a Sunday.
On a Monday,? no crashes whatsoever.
It must be pure usage, when I had my first proper computer about ten years back, it took a full week to get a dial up, when you plug a new one in now, as I did last week, all the providers software jostles for position, and indeed still are doing it.