Therefore I'm asking you, the "regular" users of EBT to avoid visiting EBT when the show is broadcast tomorrow. This way you wouldn't compete with the new users for the server resources. It may also be possible that the server would handle even the extra load without this special arrangement, but better be safe than sorry
In particular, activities such as constantly reloading the new users page to see how many new users are joining is discouraged, as you'll always able to see the results afterwards. There's a counter of online users in my forum signature -- if that number is a three-digit number, I'd suggest waiting a while before trying to connect to EBT.The forum (at forum.eurobilltracker.eu) can probably be used normally, it's unlikely that the rush would cause problems here. IRC (#ebt, #ebt.nl, #ebt.fi or #ebt.de on IRCnet) might also be a good way to stay up-to-date on what's going on.
Man bijt hond will be broadcast at around 18:55 - 19:25 CET on Friday (+1 hour for Finns and Greeks, -1 hour for Irish and Portuguese). There will probably be reruns of the show later on, but the first appearance is the one I'm mostly concerned about.
To spread the load a bit, all the small flag images etc. are now temporarily hosted at eurobilltracker.net and the cache timeouts will be slightly adjusted tomorrow to further reduce the load.
Thanks for your cooperation, and a special thank you to our TV stars
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Addendum (on 2007-03-12): That evening we peaked at about 250 concurrent users, which the server was able to handle nicely.