I also get the "Fatal Error: Maximum Timeout of 30 seconds exceeded in [Path]..." that zeroSlave posted although my page usually loads a little too. Once the page actually finished loading.
I'm no expert (far, far, far from it) but my 2 cents is:
Maybe there's too much traffic for the servers to cope with. Look, this is a seemingly small community but it's bigger than we think in terms of traffic. I mean there are the AppGameKit boards, which prolly 1% of us that frequent GC actually visit coz most of us are DBP/DBC or ex-DBP/DBC users. Then there are all the other boards too (2D/3D/Game Dev/Gen Coding/Blah) and although some are dead, they still generate traffic from outside searches. There are prolly lots of anon users throughout the day (Yeah, I'm talkin' to you guys. I seeeee you...), lurking, going through code, looking at halp. I think that adds up. There's a lot of data to transfer on this site too as I use over 2MB just for a brief visit. A large portion of that data comes directly from the TGC server - like TGC advertising,
src="http://www.thegamecreators.com/images/ads/Freedom-Engine-Banner-728x90px.jpg"
, so when you add up all that bandwidth, it's no wonder there are t/o's all the time. Maybe I'm wrong but this has been on my mind for a while as the cause.
If I'm right, best thing for them to do would be to store the forum images somewhere else, off the main server, eg a dedicated server for images and uploads, and link to them. Quite honestly some images are quite unecessary and could be coded, for a similar look, with a minimal style change, like the header which consists of image pieces, eg:
.
Actually doing away with themes would be good too. I wouldn't care if it was the default blue. I only set it to red to make it load faster (because red makes things faster).
Dunno if I'm on-target, off-target or somewhere in between, I'm just going with what seems logical.
Anyway, maybe we should all thread-bomb the Website board (yes, there is one, there are board outside GC) with "Website is Slow! I n33dz h3lp" if they don't fix it, lol.
Silence is golden, duct tape is silver
