ratcat, I find that the forum performance slows down considerably when it gets dark down under.

They're probably transferring the service to the only PC in the UK, and since these guys are all starting their day and logging on when it gets dark here, it's no wonder the forum gets slow.

But forum performance is not the only thing that's going down.

A few months ago, the Board Reader http://boardreader.com/sp/Excel_Help_Forum_15122.html showed that we had an average of 5 replies to each post. The weekly contributors top ten list had over 250 posts at the top position and never less than 150 at position #10.

These days, those numbers are much less.

Fact is that the regular contributors have started to drift away from this forum. The owner won't feel that change for a while, since visitors still come to the site via Google searches. But in the long run, the lack of high calibre contributions will result in a reduced Google ranking, a slow, downward spiral.

We've lost several Microsoft MVPs and other highly skilled members as moderators. Some of them are still around, but others have publicly declared that this forum is no longer of much interest to them, because of the way the recent changes were handled. Most of the retired moderators post much less than they used to as mods.

This will ultimately impact the quality of solutions offered, but then, if the forum is offline or slow most of the time, people won't stick around here anyway and won't come back for a second visit.

Saddle your horse. The sunset is coming.