After a meeting with the site hosts last week, it was mentioned by Grey Matter (now ICO Solutions) that due to the amount of traffic the Total-Fishing.com site recieves, other sites hosted by Grey Matter are suffering as an effect of this. This has a negative effect on the Total-Fishing.com site itself as well in that the server is constantly overloaded. Over the next few days (hopefully) the Total-Fishing.com site will be moving onto it’s own dedicated server in the hope that this will alleviate some of the problems that it has been causing.

This though has caused the running costs of the site to be increased.

As Darren has kindly pointed out in postings on the Coarse forum the main problem that the site has is the ever increasing SQL database, which after discussion today with him, a few suggestions were made and agreed to be implemented on a 3 month trial basis initially.

• Off Topic (OT) threads are NOT going to be ‘banned’. What is asked is that short answer OT threads, such as Word Associtaion and like, are not posted on the Total-Fishing.com forums. 
  These can though be posted in the “Club House” section of the Total-FishingClub.com website for Gold Members over there. Total-Fishing.com is an angling website and it would like to stay that way with OT threads being a minority rather than a majority.
• “Message for” threads are also a growing concern. Please can you keep these types of postings to email or personal messages on the Club site (or other sites that you may both use). After looking into the posting history of the past few months there has been an increase in these types of posts.
  This also includes any variation of the threads (rewording the title does not count as being valid).
• Sales of angling related items are permitted on the forums for NON-COMMERCIAL INTEREST only. If you are a tackle dealer or selling items on behalf of the tackle trade (including wholesalers, distributors, tackle shops, etc), please email gareth.purnell@btinternet.com and advertising rates can be discussed. It is not fair on our paying advertisers if this type of activity is permitted freely on the forums. Sales of non-angling related items of a commercial interest are also not permitted.

As stated, these temporary rules are of immediate effect and will be reviewed after 3 months and statistics compared. If there is no or minimal change in the bandwidth and database usage of the site during this period, then the above will be revoked.

Please appreciate that it was a hard decision to put these rules into effect as this site has always been about free speech and very relaxed moderation, but as needs are a must, a trial basis was the minimum that could be placed into effect.