JoeUser is not just slow but it's been flakey lately. It's been very frustrating for me to deal with that.

The site's traffic has increased considerably in just the past few months. From 120,000 visitors in November to 160,000 already in February.

But that's not what's causing the problem. It's WinCustomize which shares the same databases as JoeUser.com. Its traffic has climbed from 10.2 MILLION visitors in November to almost 17 MILLION so far this month in 24 days.

But it's not like the hardware as doubled. In fact, it hasn't changed at all. Hence our problem.  And since JoeUser.com's free, it doesn't get the priority I'd like it to get.  But it IS being worked on.  The new forums are much faster than the old ones and they are being updated on a regular basis.  But it'll probably be quite awhile before the main site is updated.

Instead, what's goign to happen is that we will soon have a WinCustomize subscription drive to try to buy some mroe hardware for WinCustomize. This will take some of the strain off of JoeUser. But I do share your frustrations about the site being slow. 

In the nearn near term, the IT guys are working on reliability.  Little "bugs" that don't affect site stability at traffic level X start to bring things crashing down when traffic level Y is met. So they're fixing that which will hopefully also improve performance some as well.