Aye, we might have to go back to pre-Xmas avatars to get this working unfortunately!
I'll explain the gist of what the problem was: as was currently set-up, avatars were being stored as an extension of
www.newcastle-online.org/nufcforum/index.php which means that every time an avatar loads on a page (each single avatar per post) we were basically loading an entire "page" rather than the single "image", which is obviously putting unnecessary load on the server.
In order to remedy this problem you need to move all avatars from their current location to a brand new directory within the server FTP, plus change multiple settings along with it. Unfortunately the need is such that we probably have to go back to the last stored set of avatars, which was done before all the Xmas stuff got uploaded.
Once we get the process done, though, people will simply be able to re-upload their Xmas/new avatar again and they'll be stored in the new directory and we won't have to fiddle with them ever again.
I know it's frustrating, but basically we're starting to do things "right" as far as the forum goes so that we can get the very best performance out of it. As it stands there's an awful lot that simply hasn't been configured correctly and doesn't run properly which leads to crashes and errors and slowness.
We've got a checklist to work through now, basically, but the avatars should be the only things that affect you guys too much.
