Hi Gilles,

Sorry for the delayed reply. I was hunting for your email which seems to have slipped through. I've recovered it and have a detailed reply in draft which I will send you in due course. Thanks so much for that feedback. We had to move because the old forum software was very, very old and very insecure. Keeping the spam at bay was a huge task. Not to mention hammering from the bots. These forums would normally need just a basic shared hosting but I had to move to a dedicated server to cope with the load. All that stuff is back under control now in a major way. And long-suffering Harry (who never complained, BTW) now finds he has several more free hours every week.

I was very reluctant to make any major change - I'm not the changing type of guy and while some of the drawbacks of moving were anticipated, some weren't and I'm working to fix them. Yes, I do have a safe copy of the old database.

More in the email. It's a long weekend here so please bear with me if that spills over to Tuesday or so. There's some other stuff I wanted to chat with you about that's best left to email.