Letters to the Editorial Staff of AVSIM

Hello AVSim, I am new to Flight Simming and I love your site, and I especially respect the fact that you are the biggest, I am sure there are some good reasons that you are the biggest, but I have a couple of minor beefs. I can not use Mozilla-Firefox with cookies turned off, I have to use MS Internet Explorer with cookies turned on, I mean your competitors do not have this requirement. When Posting/Starting-A-Thread, I put 15-20 minutes into word-smithing / spell-checking my post, and I can not copy/paste into the post-form, what gives?! The above copy/paste issue just now caused me to post a question at a competing forum instead of here. Sincer…

"Best answer" is a useful feature and takes you straight to the solution. Obviously it's up to the OP to choose which answer helped them best. But quite a few times recently I've noticed the OP marking their own post as Best Answer and in that post talking about how the advice from another member solved their problem. This is an abuse of the feature and means you still have to search for the post that helped most. The forum software should only allow the OP to mark another members post.

It would be nice to be able to hide some of the sub forums out of view as every week it seems to a new addition to the roster.

Hi all, this is addressed to the AVSIM staff. Why is it that when I post a topic inside the P3D forum section, it does not show up in the "Latest Forum Topics" on the main page? Do I have to enable anything? Very bizarre, Regards, Mario

Recently it was enforced that your signature could not display information about your computer (processor, RAM, etc.) and they were to be moved to the "MY PC" section under the avatar. Due to the issues experienced with performance, this function has been removed. At this point, are we allowed to place sim/pc specs inside of the signature, so as to help diagnose hardware based issues? Thanks,

I guess I've changed something somewhere but have no idea what. Can someone help me please? Thanks.

Tom, I am wondering if you can explain (in layman's terms) why the forums are performing so poorly lately. Now I know this seems to come up at the time of a major release such as the recent release of the 777 SP1 and 300ER. Having said that, I am quite surprised that the total number of users is relatively small (800 to 1000). Yes that is a lot of people accessing the forums but in the grand scheme of what we see on the internet these days with millions or even tens of millions of people accessing sites simultaneously I would have thought the Avsim forums would have no issue handling a few thousand connections. Just wondering. thanks,

I could not understand why there was so much bad press about the AVSIM forums and it's moderators. I have always been helpful on the forums, helping people with problems, helping to develop interest in this hobby we all enjoy. Lately there has been a topic on a new piece of software, designed to improve FSX. This software came with a demo version and many claims. After trying this much talked about software, I found that not only did it not do as it stated, but made things worse. Upon un-installing the software, the problems still remained. I then had to do a complete format of my computer, reinstall of FSX and all my software, all my add-ons and complete all the …

This is NOT a complaint ...... purely observational to help those in IT. The recent "upgrades" to hardware/software does not appear to have any effect on the website access times at my location (Far N.E. Georgia). It is still running slower than other websites (sim and otherwise). Just thought you'd like to know so you can report to the proper personnel.

Howdy. I've been a casual user here on Avsim since ... forever? What an awesome site - the forums, file libraries, the reviews - all of it has greatly enhanced my experience in using flight sims since the PC AT / 286 days. I am truly thankful that so many people have donated their time to making it great... Which is why I'm posting this question... Isn't the "we are heavily loaded / registered users only" message self-defeating? Without seeing all of the awesome, awesome content, a new user has little reason to spend the time to register, and that page doesn't make a good first impression. I can't imagine it's good for SEO either. In the age of ultra high performa…

I wasn't going to comment on this but browsing through the 'Screenshot' forum and 'Microsoft sells FS' threads it's become painfully obvious a key feature is missing from our forums. Thanks to the few very vocal among us they have collectively chipped away at the wall an brought it down. We had a healthy debate about the whole issue but these guys couldn't leave it alone. Some demanded a response for a vote and when they didn't get it their undies were in a bundle so they spoke on the issue again. Then they purposely abused the system to get a rise out of the mods but the biggest below the belt tactic was personally going after Tom to ###### him off to shut the whole …

What is going on of late at Avsim's webpages? First, in the mornings, I had repeated '503 Errors Service Unavailable' error flags. Now it is happening late evening. Pages are taking an eternity to load, or that same 503 Error Service Unavailable crops up repeated when trying to look at topics. And before anybody suggests it, I have repeatedly cleared my Firefox cache too, so it cannot be that when I can easily load webpages all over the Internet. Hopefully, somebody will have an answer.

Sorry if I am posting in the wrong forum for this, but I'm looking for a bit of help and advice.On July 16th I purchased all three of the FSD porters for FSX for roughly 76.00. I installed them onto a 5 year old computer of mine and had a blast with them.Two weeks later I upgraded my comp to a duel core intel, a 8800gtx graphics card, 4 megs of ram and the latest version of xppro sp3 oem. Installed the porters onto the new fsx/accell pack install and flew around for a few days. Had no problems except some weird flight model problems and an engine starting problem. Contacted FSD about these problems and they responded in a very strange string of emails. Below you can …

First of all: Please don't get me wrong, I don't want this to sound like if I couldn't take any negative opinions about myself or my posts - I certainly can! What I sometimes think, though, is that it might be helpful to give a reason when using the dislike button, because I think that this button can imply a lot, but doesn't specify at all: -) Is it something I said, that made someone else dislike my post? -) Is how I phrased it? -) Is it because someone doesn't make a difference between dislike and disagree? -) Is it something completely different? I mean, I always feel somewhat disappointed when reading a post that got voted down (or, for that matter, receiving a…

Hey all! When trying to post a new topic name, I've noticed that the forum automatically de-capitalizes successive capital letters. I find this quite unnecessary and slightly out of place, especially in a forum dedicated to flight, where we tend to throw in ICAO codes, and such in the titles of our topics. Egll and Baw014 just doesn't look right to my eye and gives me a bit of an OCD tick Regards, Aamir

Quoting Tom from the Banning thread: No need to close the thread on our account Tom. We British can handle it. B)

Sorry, haven't watched any of the Fast and Furious movies ... but I have noticed that AVSIM has been running very well, with excellent response times. The changes (both hardware/software) that have been implemented has really improved performance. Thanks for getting this place back on the fast and furious wagon Tom and Crew. :drinks: Cheers, Rob.

Hi Folks, I made two separate donations to Avsim yesterday, using the PayPal system thats integrated into the donate forum section. Both were elligible to have the "donator" banner added to my ID, but as yet it has not been added? If there's a time delay, forgive my impatience - no hurry - it's just not clear to me whether it does take some time to update, or whether the donations haven't been picked up. Thanks. Dave.

To AVSIM Staff, Do you know that the main logo image here weights 87Kb? I mean this one. And these are the kilobytes server should serve on each page request. By converting this image to JPG (even with highest quality settings) you could reduce it's size 3 times down to about 25Kb without any noticeable visual difference. Not it will save AVSIM servers from overload, but there could be some other similar miss-optimizations. ...and one more thing: Looks strange and VERY suspicious. Do not open the link below without some virus barrier! Note the word 'toxic' here. The screenshot is made right on THIS page. And it's a link to this page: http://forum.avsim.net…

Sirs , I know that there have been problems logging on to AVSIM recently and that you are working on a solution . Some days are better then others but such as this morning was unable to join ( 10:10 local time - GMT +1 and 464 visitors ) got no further than the main page . Going to the forum brought up the 503 message . Before anyone mention clearing the cache , restarting the browser , restarting the PC , all were tried but no effect . Also tried with Internet Explorer ( after changing to Firefox as main browser ) but made no difference . I remember reading that Tapatalk was one of the reasons for problems in the past and am unwilling to look for the post where this w…

Glad to see you back! What excitement that must have been....

Hi, Today, I spent 30 minutes typing up some detailed instructions for a merge, to send to Ron Attwood and when I hit send, I lost everything, as I appeared to have been logged out by the system, while active in the PM dialogue, typing. As I'm sure you can imagine, this is incredibly frustrating - when you have about 32 minutes free time per day and you spend 30 mins of it trying to help a fellow hobbyist and lose all of your effort. Can anyone confirm that this behaviour is normal for the PM system? At least if we know we can permanently and formally ensure that anything getting "typed up" into AVSIM that takes some time (eg... PMs, Reviews, long posts, …

Hey AVSIM, I saw a post in a thread that got me to the point I thought I would drop a line here as a suggestion... "Freeware Appreciation Week". The post actually suggested a Freeware Appreciation Day, but then I thought, heck, why not make it a whole week? AVSIM could be "ground zero" the effort here, maybe even payware developers would help sponser in some way (I'm sure many of them started as freeware developers). I forsee a week of AVSIM articles on freeware developer interviews, tips on freeware design, freeware reviews, freeware tips & tools, Hardware "how-to's", etc., I could go on and on. Sure it would take sever months to plan but maybe could b…

Has the font style and size changed on the forums in the last couple of days? I thought I might have inadvertently changed my settings but haven't. They appear slightly stretched horizontally and the style is different.

Worldwide Best Flight Sim Sites. You may be aware that I am trying to create a quality reference resource listing the Best Flight Sim Sites as a reliable guideline for all simmers to use as a safe reference tool for our simming community. See: http://topflightsimsite.gotop100.com/ - just started last week. - Please note that I have added a Banner for AVSIM - which is already getting some interest - this can be removed - or I can send you the details of the Member Account and your staff can take it over and manage as you see fit. The gist of it is that simmers vote for sites that they believe provide a quality of service to meet their simming needs. The negativ…