As part of 'performance tuning' on Cairn Talk I'm making a small change in the way guests will view the forum. I will be turning OFF display of avatars and signatures for guests. This will have several beneficial effects:

• It will reduce wasted bandwidth and CPU consumption by search engine spiders and robots
  
• It will encourage registered members to log in
  
• It may encourage guests to become members to access additional features - see also Why bother to register? for a table of the main differences
  

For those registered members who actually prefer not seeing avatars and signatures, you can turn them off in your control panel under Board Settings.

Please note that this will not change ANYTHING for registered logged-in members.

Tip: if it says 'Group: validating' under your name in posts, you have not yet completed the registration process. Click 'resend validation link' on the main page. An email with a confirmation link will be sent to the email address in your profile.

I have the option of turning off display of ALL images to guests, but I'd prefer not to do that at this time. If we get close to the edge of our alloted CPU resource, then I may have to consider that more drastic measure in the future. Again - it would have no effect at all on registered, logged-in members.

Registered, logged-in users will also see fewer, less obtrusive, ads.