Hello, RingAnimated.
It is late in Europe and on the U.S. east coast. A big part of the problem is that very few people still use Windows Vista, or remember its technicalities. The part of the forum we are in was once its own website, called winvistaforums.com, dedicated to Windows Vista assistance. It was the pre-cursor to the current forums as they exist today. We made sure that every message and every user from those forums were automatically migrated to Windows 7 Forums, and this site, is in fact, the culmination of two separate forums that merged precisely one year before Windows 7 was released.
In fact, more people are now using Windows XP and Windows 7 than Windows Vista. Those who were on Vista quickly moved on to 7, while those in XP are either stuck without an upgrade path, or choose to keep their existing system afloat.
Nonetheless, I would have been happy to help you, but am, as of late, either working with advertisers, looking at some technical feature on the site, or preparing my next YouTube presentation. At the time you were writing this, for instance, I was busy implementing suggested changes that were sent to me from PR Manager Mitchell_A regarding the Windows8Forums.com forum structure (to make it less complex and more navicable).
It won't be long until I am once again back in the hot seat, answering lots of forum questions.
You will find that, unfortunately, the majority of our visitors are, indeed, lurkers, who have either chosen not to create a free account or don't know how. (There are ways we can work on improving this). We recently moved our registration page to 256-bit encryption, but some unencrypted data needs to be allowed for registration to work. This was done so that spam bots would need to connect to multiple ports, parse encrypted text, and still be able to register. As one of our administrators puts it, we have implemented Dick Cheney-esque security on our registration pages, and have seen registration numbers drop off from 50-60 a day to around 10. This is unfortunate, and we are evaluating ways to continue to battle the scourge of spam without compromising our viewer experience. One way we are doing this is through new moderator recruitment. At one point, we did have moderators in nearly every other time zone. However, as the team has gotten older, many of our most respected moderators have branched off into their own projects. One of them, Shyam, is brilliant, and recently began his own technology website. He is a highly accredited individual from India, and would normally be here at these late ours. Most of our team in the northwestern hemisphere is on the U.S. east coast, and unlike me, they often get extensive sleep.
It is important to realize that the team members that are overseas are likely at work as well, or preparing for it. Many members are as well. An important note, is that our team of moderators and the volunteer staff was initially never assembled to answer questions, particularly. Yet as times changed, so did their good nature and abilities. Some of our more prominent moderators (some gone, some remain) did receive nominations for their extensive contributory volunteerism.
Stick around with us, my friend. Not all is lost
