Hi Bill,

Yes, the brickboard seems to be on some kind of end of life support in recent months. The server is crawling as bad as the days it was on Jarrod's old IBM 386 PC (or whatever spare PC he had access to at the time). That's why all the duplicate posts these days with people hitting Submit a second time or backing up and re-posting, which simply wastes more precious bandwidth. I've seen no feedback from Jarrod in ages. Last I heard, Jarrod was still running it on his own home server. I'm not an expert on such things, but recent changes suggest that it's being throttled by overall bandwidth restrictions (as determined by the host server account) coupled with an excess of Google ads having to be included in the process from the Google ad servers. Doesn't seem to make much difference with or without an ad blocker. It may also be that Jarrod somehow has it throttled down on his own internet connection. Can't blame him for ignoring us or cutting corners while doing his best to keep this going for such a small user base and no worthwhile revenue to offset his costs, let alone his time.

Also, the brickboard cookie handler is forever getting out of whack with your current browser cookies (at least three different brosers of mine have periodic problems) which causes a server error, denying further access until the cookies are either manually cleared (an instant fix) or the cookies eventually time out (like the next day).

Based on time of day, there's seemingly no relation to the number of simultaneous users (as few as there are now). Every now and then I get a fast normal page display, like quite a few this morning, but 95% of the time it's more like 10-25 seconds to refresh or display a page, which is an eternity for most people these days. Back in my very early IT days as a mainfame and minicomputer systems and communications analyst that would have been almost acceptable.

A simple single packet ping I just did to the server was variously from 1 to 300 msecs from various parts of the planet, with USA pings being among the worst, averaging over 150 msecs. That strikes me as pretty pitiful to turn around the many packets and ads needed to display a full webpage.

It would be a crime to lose the brain trust in these forums. Between the two main forums, there's probably well over a 1,000 years of accumulated Volvo knowledge and experience here. The average contributor age in the RWD forums is likely well over 65 now, if not closer to 75. Of course the average age of our RWD cars is in the 30 to 40 year range, so little surprise the owner base is also aging. A number of us are no longer fit to regularly crawl under a car. Even I'm considering farming out jobs to a shop with a hoist, like installing the engine mounts and exhaust systems that are currently on my do-list.

Cheers to all of us still here, able to help and learn from others to keep so much of this aging Swedish iron still rolling!
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Dave -still with 940's, prev 740/240/140/120 You'd think I'd have learned by now