As it is and in spite of very admirable efforts by our volunteer developers, the site is still effectively dead during peak periods. NOIE: I know more servers on on the way, but it will be a couple weeks - at least - until they are on-line. The slowdown does not make us look good to clueless visitors to our site who are only looking for information. A great many of those people will simply not wait and move on while us Wikipediaholics spend hour upon frustrating hour trying to police the site and contribute content. As a temporary measure in situations like this, I propose that all the wikis be locked into read only mode with no log-ins accepted and a sitewide message be displayed on the top of each page saying what is happening, why, and how they can help by donating (with a donation link). This could be phased-in with the English language sites going read-only first, and then for all other wikis as the site message is translated. Read performance should greatly improve with all page requests cachable and database usage at a minimum, That way we are still available to readers (by far our most numerous users), everybody is informed, and our editors get a much needed break from a frustrating editing experience. This should also have a side benefit of greatly increasing donations. So, what does everybody else think? -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav) __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250