Head in the clouds

Done, and the link forwarded on my mailing list. Good luck Trevor!

The best way is south to Katherine, west to Kununurra and Broome, spend six months in Broome, after that nothing else matters, ever...

Tell 'em it is your back garden, it's just the house is facing the wrong way....

I just wish the Tassies would stop calling the rest of Australia the North Island!

I was aware of the very hard work it takes to keep HBA running smoothly, so the background you listed here is good information to know, I didn't know about the competitor's disputes though. Thanks Ian.

I just checked the HBA platform and was very surprised to see it is a vbulletin product, as mentioned by a previous poster here. What I do know, though, is that the development cost exceeded $16k and it has one very dedicated IT bloke to protect against the hackers and organise the several times daily backups, a heap of vigilant moderators and the site owner is also an IT wizard... It seems big blogsites are definitely not for the faint-hearted.

This one, (recflying) is very good, and if yours becomes this good it'd be very hard to move it from a poor (read cheap, or free) platform, to another one if you wanted to, especially without effectively starting again. So you need to have a good understanding of what your site might end up as, and how expandable/developable the software is/will be. Not to take anything away from Recflying, but the very best platform that I know of, with the best features, support, development etc is the one HBA uses - there's a link in my signature and developer details at the bottom of each page, but it's far from free software... expect around $10k for a basic template. Then, as Ian alluded to, expect to pay a full-time IT man to deal with spam and other idiots. The bigger the site becomes, the bigger the attacks it will attract. Quality blog sites carry heavy ongoing costs and workload, so it requires a big commitment or will assuredly join the smoking heap of previous well-intentioned projects.