Wiebke,
I am sorry that I am not here at your beck and call - I am currently very busy with my teaching job. There is a lot going on at the minute such as new marking policies, courses, xmas play, marking, observations, planning etc etc.
The other day, during a bit of time I did have to spare, I looked at our bandwidth usage and noticed that we had gone way over - we were looking at over £100 charge. The first thing that I did was remove un-necessary features of the forum such as the arcade, chat room and games room. This is a guinea pig forum after all and those features have nothing to do with guiena pigs. If you would like to play online games then go to an online games website. If you would like to use a chatroom, find an online chatroom. There were many new members abusing the features of The Games Room as they were being encouraged by some members to use it as a way of increasing their post count so that they would be able to use other features of the forum. The next thing that I did was ring Debbie and ask her how much donations we had left. I worked out that we needed to spend £150 to increase our bandwidth limit for the rest of the hosting year. If I didn't act immediately, we would inccur the £100 charge as well as having to upgrade the following month (total coming to over £250!) Debbie informed me that we were a bit short so she gave me her card details so that she could fund the rest of the costs. Somebody had asked on the forum where the Game Room had gone and I quickly responded saying what I had to do to ensure that we kept the costs down. I did not have time to post a full message at that time to explain what had been removed.
Regarding your comments that you would like a better facility to contact mods then no... you have the option to PM us and that is it. We all have lives outside of the cyber world and have a right to our own privacy and time away from the forum.
I am sorry that I missed out the donations thread - I, too have a life outside the forum and have to spend regular time away on family business; unfortunately, this thread was posted on one of the days I was away. Sadly, the donation request thread doesn't seem to have been in circulation for more than one or two days, during neither of which I had access to the forum.
It would be good if someone would bump up a thread like this for a few days or even a week in order to catch a wider range of members - it doesn't necessarily HAVE to be a mod, but it could be done by one of the buddies or regular posters. Especially as I do not seem the only regular who has been missing out on it, seeing the posts on other relevant threads! There is quite a lot of support from forum members, but you cannot count on everybody being on every day - as you know well yourself!
I want to point out that I have never recommended people to use the arcade in order to gain more posts; I have only encouraged them to answer other member's threads. I have admittedly been playing often myself simply to pass the time because of the slowness of the forum. It has taken sheer aeons to paste in a link to a forum thread! I have certainly no problems living without the arcade for the sake of a faster forum.
However, my repeated requests for better accessibility have a valid reason. In de facto absentia moderatorum, I have been from time to time contacted about issues by forum members that I would have preferred to discuss with a mod there and then. It is not a position that I have sought nor am I comfortable with being treated as the inofficial face of the forum by some. Anyway, with the mods not being a tangible presence, this is what in effect has happened.
After my previous unencouraging experiences with mods in corpore, I have muddled through on my own, having got the same message ("we are too busy" ) for over a year over virtually every single item I have approached the mods about. I want to state very clearly that I have most certainly never abused your precious time in any way or at any time, Ellie! Please stop treating me like a preschooler speaking out of turn! If you mods to not want to be an active part of the forum, you need to create an interface or it will create itself - QED.
If you are all so short of time over such a length of time, why don't you look for more mods or forum buddies and review the activity of the single forum buddies regularly? You obviously got enough applications/interest for any position if I remember correctly.
There are enough areas which have become a major source of exasperation to regular users that need a clarified stance from the mods. The forum has changed a lot over the last year with most of the old stalwarts having drifted away and many more new members having joined, and it urgently needs adjustment in more than technical issues.
