Gentlemen:

I apologize for the belated response to your complaints. Between flu and sever bronchitis, I have been down sick for close to 2 weeks and not had an opportunity to monitor on-going things.

I do want to address a couple of critical points raised...

If it were not for the ads being displayed, this site would not exist.

NOTHING is free. The site is hosted from a server farm and access to the internet is not free nor cheap.

Archive vs current is always a challenge. Yup, I could spin up a more up-to-date version of this forum software which would abandon the legacy/archive data from the past few years.

Almost did that until it became evident that doing so would require everyone to create a new account. And, there is a surprising large number of search requests serviced that come from other site linkages to archive 4x4Wire data. Pirate4x4, ask.com, and many others have links to site data.

So, jettisoning archive data is not a viable option when trying to maintain a site that enjoys a good Google search ranking.

I would gladly dump all advertising if I could maintain a cash flow that would keep the site on-line. With that, I am sure there are going to be comments that it doesn't cost that much to host a site. I invite you to submit proposals that will support 200+ concurrent users with reasonable response time. On top of that, provide for firewall and anti-virus protection with current server software updates and hardware maintenance.

For those that remember, August was a bad month for 4x4Wire due to a site hack that resulted in additional costs to keep the site on-line.

I apologize. I don't mean to demean nor be dismissive of your complaints. I do know the realities of keeping the site on-line.

And, ads are the reality of producing the income to pay the monthly bills.