Stilly -

YOU KNOW not to download MOABS, and I KNOW not to download MOABS, but an innocent visitor might not know. And even someone who knows might just click the wrong end of the links.

And the comment was obviously facetious, since you can't know what someone else is downloading when you click your clack.

Problems with opening a file or posting are much more likely to depend on what someone else is doing here than on what you do. The server has a finite queue limit, and a preset timeout to discard attempts to connect if your request can't make it to the top. Collisions, where the server tries to process more than one hit at a time are less common than in "the good old days," but apparently still occur. And if you're lucky enough to be relayed here through multiple intermediate servers, and of them can lose you, expecially if traffic is high somewhere in your relay link path. (High traffic means several hits within a few seconds, or milliseconds, not just millions per day, and "instantaneous overloads" may not be visible in site statistics.)

"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
-- George Bernard Shaw, Irish writer

IMO, MOABS is a special case for GBS, but a reasonable amount silliness is of course part of the charm of mudcat.

John