The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

Which must be such a great loss to so very many people

It is very slow and often crashes.

Maybe the web-site is fed-up with me - I can't say I blame it ..........................

It's going on on my end, too. The site takes forever to load (if it does), also shows that error screen after posting or sending a PM.

While I'd be fine with moving, this board, when working, runs really good on an old computer like mine. Also, I fear that moving would result in a large amount of lost members, and this board would end up looking like the Player Piano forum. (RIP)

Same here, a lot of the time the site is extremely slow (pages take many seconds or even minutes to load) and sometimes not working at all. It's been that way for many months. Maybe the whole thing is living on borrowed time

Orchorsol wrote: Wed Apr 15, 2026 4:23 pm Same here, a lot of the time the site is extremely slow (pages take many seconds or even minutes to load) and sometimes not working at all. It's been that way for many months. Maybe the whole thing is living on borrowed time

A lot of the problem is just how much traffic this site gets, which you can see on the bottom of the front page:

Who is online
In total there are 874 users online :: 8 registered, 0 hidden and 866 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 6492 on Wed, 2026.03.18 @ 11:25

It had been much worse due to attacks on the site, which are mitigated by routing traffic through Cloudflare. I find statements like “Maybe this whole thing is living on borrowed time” quite hurtful, as I provide this site to you entirely at a loss and have done so for 17 years. I started hosting this site as a favor to a friend and neighbor with whom I rarely communicate, and while I have made some friends on this site over the years, this is not my hobby. I have enough stress with my IT consulting clients and other things that I will not go into here. I try to be responsive to anyone who comes to me with site issues; the vast majority of them are polite and appreciative. [I actually read this after performing a password reset.]

Upgrading the hosting or migrating this to another host would be a massive undertaking with the size of the database and the huge number of attachments. If anyone is interested in subsidizing improvements to the site or the hosting costs, please let me know.

Regards,
David

Thanks, David...

Many thanks for your continued efforts to keep us all going David. Very important work and greatly appreciated.

David states...

I try to be responsive to anyone who comes to me with site issues...

I can attest to this being very true. I have emailed and spoken with David several times and he has always been very polite and helpful. It's just a lot to keep up with the avalanche of "bot" intruders, (I guess). I wish I had helpful suggestions, but this is far from my area of expertise, (if I even have one ) I'm always at a loss dealing with anything that does not have a crank.

If it's any consolation, the Model T Ford forum that I frequent has had similar issues lately. It's probably better funded, but still has fallen victim to this stuff.

JerryVan wrote: Thu Apr 16, 2026 10:41 am David states...

I try to be responsive to anyone who comes to me with site issues...

I can attest to this being very true. I have emailed and spoken with David several times and he has always been very polite and helpful. It's just a lot to keep up with the avalanche of "bot" intruders, (I guess). I wish I had helpful suggestions, but this is far from my area of expertise, (if I even have one ) I'm always at a loss dealing with anything that does not have a crank.

If it's any consolation, the Model T Ford forum that I frequent has had similar issues lately. It's probably better funded, but still has fallen victim to this stuff.

Indeed, any time a member has issues, David will promptly respond and solve the problem. It is wrong to complain about something that is free and helpful.

Raphael