Hi,
First, the forum is really getting better (you have finbaly removed the applets!!!) nice!
I think that the sugestions made here will get you in trouble one way or the other and won't solve the problem that is more important: speed!
Instead of adding more code to your page to work around the problem, you should follow the KISS roule (Keep It Simple [and] Stupid) and solve the problems them selves (that are quite simple, in fact!).
The delay in showing the content has to do with two things: heavy downloads and missing information for the browser to show the page.
The first thing the browser does is to download the pages (frameset definition and the each of the frame's content. Then it processes them to gather all the required information to show them.
For your site to work better (fyou must "help" the browser to do his job.
You can do this by:
1) Reducing the page size to it's minimum (you must optimize the kiteforum templates)
2) Allowing the browser to draw the page asap by doing this:
- Set all image's dimentions height and width attributes
- Set all table cell's size
3) You can do other optimizations, but start with these two
!
After a superficial view, the forum's main problems are:
- The forum homepage (main list) is too big: 150K!! You can reduce it to 100k on-the-fly
- The icons don't have their dimentions so the browser has to download the first bytes of EACH image (or check the cache, etc) to figure out their size to, only then, be able to show the page for the user (for example the templates/Kiteforum/images/icon_latest_reply.gif or the templates/Kiteforum/images/icon_minipost.gif don't have them, just to name two).
Both these problems are corrected in the kiteforum templates. No programming required! (ok, just "template programming" if you can call it programming!)
I hope this helps! If you need help with the template fine-tunning, tell me (it's free
))!
Keep up the excelent work!