I want to make one last general comment regarding internet connections, older hardware and site accessibility. I’ll stop moaning after this I promise...
I assume BYC is interested in growing. Obviously the USA is a vast continent and now certainly the majority of contributors are American and probably a high percentage of future members will be to.
A great many Europeans and people in the rest of the world are learning English as a second language and many that I come across already speak English well enough to navigate and participate on BYC. The internet means that people in other countries could join and participate in BYC; any browser enquiries regarding chickens through Google at least, will trawl up BYC on page 1.
Fast internet, while spreading rapidly isn’t going to reach the more rural areas in Europe and other global zones for a while yet. It’s expensive to supply by cable and not terribly good by beacon and satellite, even with 4G systems.
Most of the people who keep chickens live in these rural areas; BYC’s prime future audience.
Anything that can be done to make BYC more user friendly for those in rural areas has in the long run I would argue got to be good for BYC.
There are sites now that I used to visit that have become so bloated with pop ups, badly scripted advertising, animated content and auto load video content that I just don’t bother using those sites any more. Too much badly implemented content chews up bandwidth unnecessarily. There are a couple of University library sites that I use that have finally recognised this problem. Many of their users are students with relatively low powered laptops, or mobile phones searching through hundreds of pages, often wanting a number of pages available simultaneously to compare. They have implemented a low bandwidth content policy.
Just a thought.
