LOL - just seen this vB announcement on the Dr Who Forum:
Quote:
2 JANUARY 2009
PEAK HOURS OPERATION IN EFFECT
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Quote:
Due to the announcement that the new Doctor would be announced tomorrow (January 3), our Forum has been inundated with several thousand users today, and so the Doctor Who Forum at Outpost Gallifrey is under temporary "peak hours" operation status.
As we first announced last October, this happens in our Forum only at specific, pre-announced times during events of great significance in Doctor Who fandom, such as new UK episode transmissions and major announcements, during which the Forum would normally crash from the massive influx of visitors we usually receive.
During Peak Hours times, Forum operation is limited solely to Patron members who have supported the operation of the Forum. As we explained in our announcement, this was the only fair, logical and technologically feasible way to differentiate users, in order to avoid server traffic problems and the inevitable and catastrophic Forum crashes that brought down our Forum for everyone. Please note that we made this announcement several months ago regarding this process.
The Forum will reopen as soon as message traffic dies down, normally a few hours after the start of peak hours operation, depending on when our Forum management feels activity has been reduced.
As always, we appreciate your continued support of the Doctor Who Forum.
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What kind of operation are they running over there? With the amount of traffic they get, they could make a fortune on Google ads, and rent server and bandwidth capacity to match, but instead they charge subscriptions and then let only people who have paid up read the forum at times when it actually gets busy, thus deliberately denting what could otherwise be very impressive usage stats.