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Dakka, as a website in general, has a lush, and therefore somewhat high population-density, interface to match it's functionalities. I wonder if The Powers That Be have ever considered the lower bandwidth users and how this affects (ie: slows right down) their Dakka experience? I, for one, am consistantly accessing Dakka over a satellite connection, which I realize must represent a tiny proportion of Dakka users. However, with the advent of netbooks and webphones, I could easily see Dakka users following the trend of trying to access Dakka over a device with limited bandwidth.

Has anyone thought about making some of Dakka accessible over a stripped down interface that would make users facing similar issues as I have to wait a little less?


Also, on a side note, has anyone ever thought about putting together a Dakka update FAQ, so that people like me could check up on what's on the site designers to-do list so we know what NOT to bother suggestting and wasting your time? Saying the same crap to different people about what you are trying to do and why HAS to get old.

Optimisation has always been a low priority, but we are now within 2 major releases (5-6 months) of the optimisation phase. The release today trimmed about 10% off the average load time and that was just some general warm up to the real deal. All dakka's stuff is on two domains (dakkadakka.com and images.dakkadakka.com) to keep DNS lookups down, and we dont allow external avatar hosting to keep that down. We encourage hosting of images so that everything can be kept on site which will allow us to better optimise in the future.

If you want to speed up forum loading, make sure your web browser has a large cache available to it, then go to your dakka user profile and disable signatures as this will cut down on a lot of external images and therefore extra DNS lookups and connections which are very slow over satellite. You can disable avatars as well if you want to cut down on the number of images in a thread too.

Dakka already makes sure we will fit on netbook resolutions, and a trimmed down mobile phone / lite version is planned for the medium term future (will be a while). Yak and I both use phones to access dakka from time to time so it is something we are definitely interested in.

I dont want a dakka update FAQ as I basically work to when I want to and do what interests me. I have vague plans that I generally keep to, but I move around 10-15% of it each release, and some major long term projects get axed or moved around as and when I have better ideas or opportunities arise. I like to keep things a bit of a secret so that they are a nice surprise when they launch too, plus it keeps the pressure off me. I dont mind people asking for the same things over and over as it gets me thinking about it more and refreshes my memory if I have pushed something too far down the todo list too.