Hi Trish,

To avoid losing everything in a post, I will sometimes write it in MS Word first, then copy and paste into the forum. It has happened on other fora that if I get diverted and get back later, a forum screen times out and I have lost posts that way.

This site uses active-X controls and I wonder whether the IT wizzes amongst the members would know whether that has an effect on stability?

Cheers,
Frank

well i dunno trish?

since i swapped to firefox i have had a good run using these forums, all i can come back to is are you sure that there isn't something local on your machine causing the hiccups?

do you have the very latest version of firefox?

do you manage your computer with antispyware programs, and use a program like ccleaner to clean up after each day and then sue their registry cleaner maybe once a week/fortnight/month?

do you daily clean out any cookies you don't personnaly need? ccleaner can be set to clean all cookies each time you sue it if that suits, clceaner also cleans out the cache and history folders, if these folders are full of uselees stuff they can cause conflicts.

if you wish i can suggest an itineray of programs that we use that keeps us functioning nicely.

maybe even consider moving from m$ o/s's to say linux ubuntu (free download) you can burn the dowload do disc so you can sue ubuntu from the disk or buy it? it is cheap enough around 5 or 6 bucks, make the move away from m$ platform which is very vulnerable and realy not that stable nor that good of a value.

on the abc site they have a technical forum which you can tell you problem story and you will get help of a more technical nature.

i type my responses etc.,. direct into the reply box provided and yes if you want to create the same topic you need to alter the heading, not such a bad idea realy.

len

Thanks, guys. Several bits of good advice I can use there.
Part of my reason for posting about my difficulties was to see whether computer crashes related to the site were common enough to explain the recent dearth of postings. Like Roysta, I felt the drop-off was sufficiently marked to be worth a little enquiry.
If it's not caused by discontent with technical problems associated with the site, could it be that the well of native-plant-chatter has just run dry, like our gardens? Are we discouraged to the point of not wanting to think about gardening? (Surely not!)
I do seem to remember that it got rather thin last autumn, too. Perhaps it's a seasonal thing.
Trish

g'day trish,

gardening forums are affected by seasonal trends eg.,. in the US of A their chat drops off a lot during winter, and i guess the same here though our winters are much milder, and then we have the compunding effect of the drought as it affects all of australia south of a line from about townsville across to the kimberley's roughly.

len

I recommend AVG for antivirus and spyware protection.

http://www.grisoft.com

I use the freeware versions. Software engineer since 1979 and this is my favored solution, in combination with NOT using any Microsoft product such as Outlook or Explorer.

Also, Firefox has a plug-in that will block most ads. You can find it at:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

When the adds are blocked it's not only less annoying to surf the site, you are also protected from accidentally (with a careless click) activating spyware or having an unwanted cookie added to your browser.

FYI, hope that helps.

Sojourner