The U-Bend #19: Public Service Announcement: CoS Forums Pledge Break

by Andrew Lee and Robert Lanto

“Of course, it was only in the wizarding world that he had money; you couldn’t use Galleons, Sickles and Knuts in Muggle shops.”
– Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Hello, you may know us as Andrew and Robert, the two wildly successful (and popular) authors of the U-Bend. But we’re not here to share our zany antics. Rather, we have to bring a most urgent matter to your attention. Every day millions of Harry Potter fans around the world use message boards to post their ideas. There is perhaps no larger forum than the Chamber of Secret Forums located here on Mugglenet. However, the ever increasing traffic has finally pushed the forums’ servers to the limit and an upgrade is needed. We need your help. Please donate (what you can) to help pay for the server upgrade.

Every day hundreds of people post, read and navigate their way through the thousands of entries on the CoS forums. Without this desperately needed upgrade, navigating the forums will become difficult to downright impossible. Without the server upgrade navigating the forums could end up like this:

User Johnny Q. finish typing his reply.
User Johnny Q. clicks send.
User Johnny Q. wait 5 minutes.
User Johnny Q. goes to the bathroom.
User Johnny Q. returns and waits 5 more minutes.
An error message is displayed.
User Johnny Q. cries and bangs head on keyboard.

Should any person be subjected to that? Of course not. That is why Mugglenet desperately needs this server upgrade.

Can you put a price on the wonderful free message board service that is provided to you? No. However, our server admins can. It costs $3,500 per server (per year) to run this service. For only $9.5890410958904109589041095890411 a day (except for leap years) can you get the best in HP fan community forums this side of the internet. With the coming of the Half-Blood Prince, Mugglenet needs to double the server capacity so we can guarantee that your post about why page 135 contains clues to the final outcome of Book 7. Otherwise, do you really want pop-up adverts every 5 seconds reminding you that your classmates can be found only two clicks away? Help keep the CoS forums ad free and navigable for all. Please donate.

Thank you all for your time and good night. This has been a public service announcement by the U-bend authors. This also fulfills the obligations of our parole for the Ford Anglia hit and run incident.

Author’s Note: Sorry for this interruption of our regular columns, but we felt this was an important issue to bring to our reader’s attention. Expect a regular U-bend next week. After all, how can you complain about the pointlessness of this U-Bend if there are no forums in which to do so?