I've installed some new YaBB modifications that should hopefully keep the forum's host from shutting us down again like they did back in July. 
Well, unfortunately, that was not the case - as our host shut down the forum for several hours this past Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. That incident now forces me to address some issues that I was hoping would rectify themselves:
First: Sadly, only 29 people besides Midnite and myself have bothered to collapse even one category on the BoardIndex. I'm truly grateful that those people are appreciative enough of the forum and what Midnite and I are trying to do here to understand that, by collapsing rarely viewed categories, they're helping to lower the forum's bandwidth usage. As for the rest of you, well...
Second: If collapsing categories were only at issue, I would probably overlook it because (unlike the archive, where collapsing categories will also be installed shortly) the main forum has only 6 categories, 5 of which have only 1 or 2 boards in them, and the BoardIndex is probably the page that gets displayed least frequently on the forum. Collapsing categories on it does save bandwidth, but it doesn't save nearly as much as keeping the
"Disable showing of YaBBC Buttons?", "Disable showing of Smiley Buttons?", and "Disable showing of Topic Summary?" boxes checked in our profiles.
Disabling these three features alone saves 20MB (or more, if there's heavy usage) of bandwidth per day, and Midnite and I are so grateful to those of you who've decided to do this on a regular basis. However, certain others on the forum, who shall remain nameless (for the moment, anyway), seem to feel that they needn't bother making their contribution to saving bandwidth because they unchecked those three boxes shortly after having read my first post in this topic - and they haven't bothered to ever check them again. Granted, disabling display of the topic summary isn't as important as disabling even one of the YaBBC code boxes or Smileys, but disabling the display of those latter two goes a
long way in saving bandwidth on the forum.
Now, I was hoping that after the forum had been shut down again this past week, these people might have said to themselves, "Gee, maybe I really shouldn't have unchecked those boxes," and they might have gone back to remedy that. But that hasn't been the case. So, once again I'm going to politely ask these people to please familiarize yourselves with the YaBBC and Smileys codes in the forum's Help section, either by printing them out or opening the Help section while posting, so that you'll be able to type them into your posts yourselves rather than relying on the buttons. And please go back into your profiles, check the "Disable showing of YaBBC Buttons?" and "Disable showing of Smiley Buttons?" boxes, and then save your profile. And to please consider collapsing at least the "General Discussions Archive" and "Why Register?" categories on the board index. Not only will you be helping to save bandwidth, but you'll be helping your fellow posters by hopefully helping to prevent our host from shutting down the forum more frequently than they already have.
Thanks!

The MB