Hi Folks,
Sorry to have caused such a fracas by not posting for a few weeks. Nick has summed things up well; I lost access to ES (and a few other websites - photobucket are still blacklisting me, even now) for a few weeks and had many heated phone calls with my ISP over my IP address being blacklisted by several websites for some unknown reason. I then found a building plot for our new house (we've been looking for a couple of years for the ideal plot) and realised that the extra time I had each day from not feeling obliged to answer multiple daily PMs, often from people who rarely (or never) post on the forum, gave me the much needed time I needed to get on with designing and building the house. I met up with Nick between meetings with house frame companies, as he rightly says, we decided (in the face of adversity) to just go down the pub for lunch.
I am disappointed with the posts from Chekola/Grant/tepol, as I have spent a lot of time trying to help her/him via PM (when to be honest I'd have much rather the questions had been asked on the forum to share the load as Nick has suggested). For example, I spent around 6 or 8 hours re-assembling and wiring up my old Tongxin and Ping set-up, with the intention of letting her/him have it for an ebike to see if it would resolve his/her mobility difficulties. Unfortunately, on the second test before I shipped the whole kit up to Scotland the controller blew and I don't have access to another one (neither does anyone else, I think, as Tongxin seem to have stopped supplying the sensorless controllers now). When I PM'd Chekola/Grant/tepol with the bad news I got a sarcastic response, very bizarrely referring to my ego for some reason. Despite this, I then tried to offer him/her further advice in many PMs about adding a battery to the bike he/she had bought, including several links to rack suppliers, without getting a word of thanks in return. I can easily post all the PMs here so people can make up their own minds if anyone is in any doubt.
Nevertheless, this series of incidents with Chekola/Grant/tepol, or any other ES member for that matter, isn't the reason I've been so quiet lately at all, it's exactly as Nick has said, I just have too much on my plate and haven't had the time to log on here, knowing there would be a massive backlog of PMs that needed to be answered.
It seems that forums have three types of people; those that give freely of their time to try and help others, those who both give help and take it when needed and those who feel that other forum members are only there to help them even if they offer nothing in return. I'd rather we didn't have the latter type of member, but would still happily try and help them if they posted on the forum to share the burden of answering their questions rather than insisting on using time consuming PMs. As I said to Nick during our meet up a few weeks ago, I was spending around 1 1/2 to 2 hours each morning dealing with PMs from this forum, time that I realised I could put to better use when I found that I couldn't access ES for a few weeks.
Best regards to everyone here, I will try and pop in when I have some free time, but things are likely to be a little hectic for the next few months so please don't expect me to be a regular visitor for a while.
Jeremy
PS: Please don't use PMs, as I am not getting PM email notifications and my PM box is most probably full to overflowing with the backlog.