Faster site and less spam

On average, our website should now load 1/4 faster, use 1/2 less bandwidth, have 2/3 fewer requests, and be way more secure.
How?

We are now using an online service that protects and accelerates our website. It automatically optimizes the delivery of our pages, so you (the visitors) get the fastest page load times and best performance.

This should also help us block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting our bandwidth and server resources. The result: a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.
Hopefully this service will get faster and smarter in the future, but it seems FM Scout is loading noticeably faster already.

The only downside is that you would be seeing less guests online, which is a result of filtering out the "bad" traffic. So as long as we have a faster and more secure website, I don't really mind to see less visitors online... the good ones only.

the loadins speed is much higher and about the bots....we need people even if the gusets online decrease. real people making real posts is what matters...not numbers.

Hopefully this will not block out the good bots, such as Googlebot that are indexing the site and keeping us on the first page of results for anything FM. I'm going to test this service for a full week before getting to any conclusion, but so far it seems quite good.

Nice one mate! Maybe you could try an add on fb to sell the site more? Guests numbers dont matter its members that matter for you. Do you have a site links page, perhaps get links up to football related sites?

To be honest it's not the member numbers that matter, but their contributions instead. Inactive members are as good as ghosts or guests.

There is an effort being done for the past 3-4 weeks to keep up with Twitter and Facebook, by posting updates and replying to comments. I'm not sure what else can be done about them really. I don't really like Facebook, so I'm not aware of what works best. I'd love to hear your advice on that.

Site links page existed, but is no more. There will be a new one, but no more under a link exchange policy. I'll be giving away traffic if it's worth giving, end of story. Football related sites sounds like it involves more than FM, I'm open to suggestions.

Added 2 hours 28 minutes later:

Changed a setting for load balancing, login issues seem to be gone now; but I'll wait until tomorrow to confirm. The 'now online' statistic seems to work as well, might restore it for public view again.

Admittedly though, and as the initial tests suggest, the site now loads roughly 80% faster (especially the homepage)... I hope there won't be any side effects, because load balancing rules!

I think the site is pretty awesome.