The forum is hosted by an oufit called Vertical Scope, in Canada. They host hundreds of forum websites, for N American communities.
Here is what they say about themselves:
VerticalScope is a privately held corporation headquartered in Toronto, Canada. We specialize in the acquisition and development of websites and online communities for the Automotive, Powersports, Power Equipment, Pets, Sports and Technology vertical markets. VerticalScope has built a portfolio of more than 600+ websites with more than 25 million aggregate pages of content and more than 105 Million unique visitors per month
VerticalScope.com
That is why the ads etc are N America orientated.
In October 2017 the site ground to a halt. Because I worked in IT Services for many years, this is kind of my bailey-wick. So I emailed them and then, at significant expense to myself, phoned them a couple of times as well.
Firstly I phoned their helpdesk/tech support ...... and it went to voicemail!!!!! Really?:eeksurprise: In my world that would have been inexcuseable as a service provider. Hanging offence with respect to service provision.
So secondly I rang their HQ and asked to speak to their CEO>
. Got a PA, explained briefly, she said "not her area, need to ring tech support", I said "I know that, been there, rung them, goes to answer phone, which is pathetic - do the C level execs know this is what is happening, no helpdesk available?". Hopefully she clocked that I kind of knew about hosting and wasn't going away. So I told her, please speak to whoever and get it sorted, thank you.
Which seemed to work, as it was.
Here is the body of the email I sent:
MINI COOPER FORUM S/W ISSUE - UNUSABLE
The forum we log onto as
www.mini2.com and you call the Mini Cooper Forum, whose membership are predominantly in the UK, has some sort of software glitch and is pretty much unusable. It has been like this for a number of days already. It is a popular forum - a lot of very unhappy members out there.
I am assuming that you provide the technical support for this forum? Let me know if this is not the case.
It 'grinds', to the extent it runs at all, at a snail's pace, takes 100% of PC for minutes at a time and continually comes up with the panel "Warning: Unresponsive Script" - see attached.
Please will you look at this immediately, assuming you have techs in over the weekend, and I'd be amazed if you didn't, and get it fixed. And please email me that you've sorted it.
Thank you,
Nigel Knight
Hope that provides a heads up.