No doubt you have all noticed the new banners at the top and the bottom of the site. I thought I would give you all a run down on why the decision was made to put them on.

We have been solely relying on the donations of members and the advertising businesses to cover the ever growing costs of running SAU for a long time now.

SAU has grown so much in the 7 years its been active and the hosting costs continue to grow. Bec (my wife) and I have not had an 'in the green' financial year for SAU for a long time and it was starting to be a bit of a strain. To make matters worse, we have almost outgrown our server and will need to look at clustering or some other alternative at some stage. This means more money is needed and as I have always said that SAU will be free to the members, this means I needed to get money from elsewhere.

Enter Yahoo. We were approached by an advertising firm that sell Yahoo-supplied ads. This meant that we could actually make a little bit of money from the site and it also means that we could put more into the site and the community.

The ads have been placed to have a minimal browsing effect on you all and when we have organised some new site designs to incorporate them more, you will hardly notice them.

Anyway, I thought I owed it to you all to explain the reasons behind the change.

Safe Driving,

Christian