Hi – I know this thread is a little bit old now, but I wanted to offer a bit of an explanation on how this has come about.

Before I start, I work for Key as a Webmaster. Not THE Webmaster for the forums, but I am responsible for a lot of the sites that we produce.

I addition, I am also responsible for the adverts on this site.

Admittedly, we got it a bit wrong at the start with showing too many adverts. I think we’ve corrected it now. Indeed the only time adverts appear within threads is when you are not logged in (or registered). That was always the intention eventually, but – hands up – I messed up there.

With regards to a couple of other points raised, I’d like to take a moment to clarify our stance on things. Bear in mind that for various commercial and legal reasons, there are things I cannot say.

From Key’s point of view, the Forum is a free service provided to the Aviation Community. Certainly, we advertise our own products on here, but we have never sought to make a direct profit.

Certainly, we’ve paid for a dedicated server to host the increasing traffic on these forums for many years. In addition, we have paid for forum software, domain names and support staff to keep these forums going. All of these years you could argue that we were running at a loss. Quite a big one really.

(I’m not privvy to whether the editors get any content from here – so don’t ask!)

Unfortunately, there are on occasion legal issues that we do have to contend with, the details of which I obviously will not disclose here. However, with regards to the legality, the current UK system holds us partly responsible for all comments. We therefore can be seen by you guys as censoring ‘free speech’ when removing content. Believe me, it’s not that simple.

Certainly Key Publishing is doing well, with four new magazines this year, and all titles performing admirably. I’m very pleased to be working here, personally. However, anybody in a corporation knows that different budgets are for different projects. If you want to dig up analysis, people are going to say “well, we’re making money on these magazines over here, but losing on this forum over here. Let’s concentrate on the magazines and stop the forum.”

Fortunately we’re not like that.

We have introduced advertising on the forums to try to cover our costs. We hopefully are not bombarding you with too much, but we are looking to earn enough to cover the upkeep. I’m sorry to hear that some of you are blocking them.

With regards to the content of the adverts – the system we are using takes a bit of a while to ‘bed in’ and get used to the content. Hopefully the adverts are now a little less annoying.

Please do let us know if you are getting performance issues. Certainly some of these could have coincidentally been due to recent issues with Talk Talk, BT and/or Blackberry.

Rest assured that we do monitor the forum and consider your opinion; we’ve just all got very busy day jobs, and hence sometimes neglect the bedside manner.

Sorry this is a bit of a long and serious. Didn’t mean to be. Just wanted to keep you posted without (hopefully) fuelling any fires.

Take care, and I’ll hopefully keep you notified when other updates are imminent.

Hi – We are looking into this, as well as other mobile-optimised alternatives for viewing the forum. More info when we have it…

Hi guys

Just as an introduction. I work for Key, but not full time on the forums. I’m a Webmaster, but not THE Webmaster here – that’s reserved for somebody much greater than I.

Thought I would just chip in on this. We have been having a couple of database problems recently with the forum. Partly because the forum is huge, and partly because the server it lives on is coming to the end of its life. Sorry about that.

We are currently setting up a new server to move the forum to that should make it much more stable. In doing so we are looking to upgrade the forum software to the latest version. The upgrade will inevitably mean there will be some cosmetic changes, but in doing so, we’ll be back to the most streamlined version.

I’ll post more nearer the event, as we’re still a way away from moving over. Suffice to say, we will try and make it as painless as possible.

Cheers, Simon