If it seems like JoeUser.com hasn't been getting much loving from Stardock lately, it's because it hasn't.  It's not that we don't love all of you and JoeUser.com, it's just that we only have so many developers and so little time to put into each project.

And while JoeUser.com does attract many thousands of users each week, WinCustomize.com attracts almost 4 million each week. And WinCustomize.com had been severely negletected for so long.

This month, all our sites will be making a cross-country journey. You may not realize it but your sites will be well traveled soon -- from California to Chicago.  This is part of an overall network upgrade for all of Stardock's servers.

But that's not why JoeUser.com is slow.  The machines are up to the job. The problem is that JoeUser.com is immensely complicated and much of it we learned as we went.  The experience we gained making JoeUser was then applied to WinCustomize.com.

For kicks, try this: Go over to WinCustomize.com (see link on the bottom), click on its forums, click on its posts. And while noticing how fast it is, also note that there are 10X more people on there at the same time as there are here and yet it's easily 5X as fast as JoeUser.com.  That's the future for JoeUser.com. Speed. Performance. And more features.

Some of the features we've been wanting to do we just can't do until after we make JoeUser.com a lot faster. For instance, we want users to be able to "ignore" other users. That is, be able to say "never show me the articles of this person".  We're not sure whether that'll be a "free" feature or not.  But it is something we feel strongly about.  We just have to figure out a way to have that kind of per user customization be able to be done without hit bogging down the database (since you can't just cache the recent article lists and such).

The forums will change too. The speed is one major change. But they'll change visually as well. In fact, the whole site will get a visual face lift as we prepare for the day when premium subscribers can really customize up their own pages.  I have a site for my World of Warcraft guild: http://mythinc.joeuser.com.  But does that look like a guild page? No. So the critieria on customization is that I should be able to make my own blog look like THIS. It's doable. It will just take some time. Many of our long time users here will be able to get free upgrades to this ability in exchange for testing it and putting up with our gross incompotence.

Speaking of our gross incompotence, I got your emails that the server was hosed yesterday. I know, I was trying to get on too and I was helpless. I rebooted the servers, tried all kinds of things but it just didn't work. Next time it happens we'll have IT guys ready to figure out what the heck happened.

I don't know exactly when we'll be able to implement some of this stuff.  Feel free to check out my personal page at http://frogboy.wincustomize.com to get an idea of  some of the features you can expect in the future though as a start and browse around WinCustomize.com to get an idea of how fast things should be (actually faster since this site, like I said, gets 1/10th the traffic of WinCustomize.com).