Addressing website speed and other questions asked.

Hey everyone, glad to have you all back. I wanted to address a few questions.

Website Speed
The speed of the website relies on multiple aspects of our code and your connection to Cloudflare/our server. We're beginning to speed it up by introducing new changes to code. We do believe we can continue to improve this and will hope you understand. Hopefully in a week, we will have a more definite and solid answer as to why the website runs at a slower speed than an older, more inefficient version. We do have leads and have been looking into it since the first notice of speed loss. The current speed is unacceptable in my honest opinion, and we will be investigating it.

Is the website design final?
No, we're actively looking into making the experience better for both our desktop and our mobile users. One way we're doing this is by making a more centralized location for navigating around the website. Another way we're doing this by trying to improve the home with more information on the topics available such as last reply. We will continue to update the website in any way we can to improve it; we're even taking user suggestion.

Is Gravatar required to have an avatar?
No, though it is strongly recommended. Using gravatar can speed up our website too, as we do not have to handle file uploads and image resizing. If you join the site, we automatically query Gravatar to see if you have a public image available for use (via your email you supplied). If you do, then we will use it. If not, a default image will be put in place. We will look into more alternatives and will improve our own avatar system.

Why aren't some features available at the moment?
Some features just didn't make the cut and we're working on adding them. We wanted to give you a working website with quality features, but not sacrifice it by giving lackluster versions of features that we just weren't able to dedicate enough time to. We are currently adding more features to the website. Some of these include private messaging, liking of posts, and search.