Riverkilt,

Ron, I'm sorry about your problem with the time it takes to load pages while using dial-up.

The fact is that this forum is huge. All the graphics and all the photos stored in all the forums, threads, and galleries must reload each and every time you move around the forum. Large, hi pixel content photos, are the worst of all when it comes to re-loading pages.

With all the forum sections, threads, posts photos and graphics on this site the only way to get them to load faster is to prune and delete stuff.

Our hope is that as people get used to the new map that we can delete all the regional, state, provincial, and country sub-forums. This should speed things up. Notice that I said "should'. We won't know for sure how much time it will save till we try it.

The reason things load in a particular order is because the forum is built in layers. The first layer to load is the Tartan background, Then everything else is placed on top of that in further layers. I didn't plan to have the advertiser banners layer load before the forum layer it is just how the software does it.