THIS IS IMPORTANT

FOR THE USER: speedy page load

FOR THE WEBMASTER: lower cost for server, cpu, traffic, database

I run this board for people in third world country. Ever connected with a 28 k modem, but the true speed is 3 k? You don’t want to try! The pages should be as small as possible.

On the other side, customers with huge boards and huge number of visitors may pay thousands of dollars in unnecesssary extra traffic and additional servers, just due to inefficiency of the board design

1) smaller pages to reduce traffic. Traffic costs money for the webmaster, and cost waiting time for the board user. Pages should be optimized for size:

* remove all white space

* make relative links to make urls shorter, not http://www.wwwthreads.com/perl/postlist.pl?xxx… but only postlist.pl?xxx

* have an optional version without tables. Tables add size, but worst of all, tables only display after the entire page has been loaded. Webbbs format loads much faster!

2) Make database size smaller: allow for simple automatic archiving to a second board, so database size of the board with the new discusssion can be small!!! Very important!!! The archive board can be big, it will have little use.

3) Allow restrictions/disconnection of functions that are server hogs, like: autorefresh of “who is online”, and the search function