First I would like to say that I also experience very bad speed issues. Today has been very very slow, but then again last night it was moving at a pretty good speed.

Second - I don't think anyone has said the site speed issues are a fault of a persons computer. I think some have suggested looking at settings, browser, and "cleaning" to help speed things up - but I believe everyone knows that the speed issues are somewhere else.

The problem: The speed issue is somewhere between the user & BrainKing. To expect Fencer to be able to solve the issue is the same as expecting us the user to fix the problem.

The internet works by going from point to point (hops) to get to the final destination. This is basicly random. From my town in Illinois, if I try to connect to the local school, some days I can get there in 3 "hops" - other days, it will take 10 "hops" going over to Indy & up to Chicago before making it back into my town. Thing is most all of the hops are pretty fast, so I don't even notice the speed difference. The problem is not all "hops" are fast. And your connection speed will only be as fast as the slowest connection. So take this example. (using Miles Per Hour just to show the example)

Hop 1 - 100Mph
Hop 2 - 100Mph
Hop 3 - 100Mph
Hop 4 - 2 Mph
Hop 5 - 100Mph
Hop 6 - 100Mph

The first hop is you, the last is BrainKing. Both are fast, but with a slow "hop" in the middle - your connection speed will be 2 Mph because the data slows down there.

Unfortunately there is not much that can be done. Someone suggested multiple servers in different locations, but that would be a very big task - probable a lot more then what a simple game site like BK would be able to do.

The one thing I would love Fencer to do is work on a "minimal" version of BK - a version that strips all but the important information so when users are in the "slow" mode, they can switch to it to still play games. So for example, a 500KB page may take 20 seconds to load. Well if you strip all the extra and make it a 100KB page, then the user will have to wait for less data and in turn should load pages faster. I thought I read someplace once that he was interested in this, but I'm unsure if he is working on it or not.

Doing some of the things I mention here: Computers (coan.net, 2007-03-12 20:16:01) - will help out..... along with changing the message per page on the discussion boards to a lower number.... like turning off the Javascript extras.... roll over smileys.... since having those off means that the extra data on the webpage no longer has to be transmitted to you - and in turn there is less data for you to wait for and can help speed things up.

** edited to add: before some tech corrects my example above, I know that is not "exactly" how it works - but should be a pretty good example for others who don't know how it works to understand it... so please don't pick about the details of my example ***