Troubleshooting Teleports by Dyerbrook

Are you ready to turn your back on this game and slam the door on the Exchange? Don't give up!

FAQS ABOUT TELEPORTATION

Many Sims games buyers have never been able to teleport, despite the promise on the package of "making your own Sims web pages" and uploading them "with a few clicks of a mouse." This is especially true for people outside the continental U.S., with slower connections, with complicated buildings and customized skins and walls, with AOL browsers, with Windows ME or Netscape users, and so on. Before you take your complaint to Maxis, try to eliminate all the problems on your side so that you can help us make the case that it really is the Maxis/EA servers that are the problem.

Currently, there are 46,000 families on the regular Sims Exchange, which represents a nearly five-times increase from two years ago, and a doubling just in the last six months! Maxis/EA officials tell you that this is a burden on their server and that is why teleportation doesn't work or requires repeated efforts. Our answer: delete families after 90 days on the Exchange automatically if they have less than 50 views or 50 uploads. That is the only fair thing to do given the intense demand for display on the Exchange. Currently only 80-100 people a day can teleport, and that isn't fair!

Most people who could teleport before Hot Date was installed, however, are finding that they cannot teleport at all now! So what has changed? It does not seem to be a feature wrong with the game, although the "updating web pages" mechanism is going wrong a lot more frequently for those with these teleportation problems. Rather, Maxis/EA has made a priority of the Hot Date Exchange, which generally works fine on uploads (many reports of game crashes on downloads, however). So it's a question of company prioritization, and if you can't teleport to the regular exchange, you need to become part of the growing chorus of complaining customers who gets this top-selling billion-dollar game company to pay attention.

If you are experiencing teleportation problems, the VERY FIRST thing you must do is check on the BBS "General" message board and "Exchange" boards at www.thesims.ea.com. If you see even one other player reporting a teleportation problem in the last few hours, or worse, a half dozen of such messages, even if their error messages and experiences are all different, then chances are the problem is not on your side, but on the Maxis side. Leave your own message of solidarity and detail your own problem. Try teleporting again when it isn't a peak time, e.g. not 9-11 p.m. EST and leave more messages. This prompts more feedback to prompt a response from the company.

Secondly, we shouldn't have to tell you this, but it's self-evident: close all your other windows and don't do other stuff like play the game or read your e-mail during teleportation. Don't breathe on it. Say a few Hail Mary's or recite the Zen Four Truths frontwards and backwards. This can help very fragile teleportation systems. We have found that working in other applications while attempting to teleport can cause errors, although this shouldn't be the case. It's especially true that if you surf the Internet or download objects from fan pages while trying to teleport, you are just courting disaster!

Now, we recommend browsing through all these FAQs, even if they don't seem to fit your problem, because you might try some of the remedies, e.g. cutting out custom files or reducing the number of jpegs, to facilitate your teleoprt.

1. How do I teleport my family?

Go to the official Maxis site at www.thesims.ea.com, site register your game to get a user name, go into "Sims Exchange" and follow instructions. Get the Game Patch if you don't have it.

Make sure you are connected to the Internet and load your game. You press on the mouse icon in the upper-right-hand-corner of the Neighborhood Screen in your game. It will take you to the HTML pages in your game. The line that says "teleport this family" is in the lower, right-hand part of your screen in white, ordinary, typeface. It is not in big type, it doesn't look like a button, it's a hypertext line, so you might miss it. But that's the thing to click on, to get "My Family Web Page" to get going.

2. I keep getting "Can't Find Page". It won't show up! What do I do? I can't see "Teleport This Family" at all!

Follow the advice of QueenLinzofHotness and plug in the java script for those pages right into your URL to force them to show up. Go into your c: drive on your computer and look for c:/programs/maxis/TheSims/UserData/WebPages and press on the file called "addressbook" to pull up the HTML page with the menu of families for that level of neighborhood (userdata2, userdata5, whatever).

Next, click on the name of the family in "addressbook" and you will get that family's "web page". Now see if you can see the "teleport this family" message down in the lower right-hand corner of the HTML web page. If you cannot, go to http://simalbums.tripod.com/simalbums/id6.html and get the teleportation patch (under Pegasus.gif) and try your luck. Be warned that if you have already reached the expansion level of Hot Date, which is supposed to incorporate this patch, and you install it now, it will very well cause other problems with your game (not serious, but annoying), such as the "My Sims Won't Go To Work" glitch, so contact us for further instruction if this patch DOES NOT help you and then your Sims won't go to work, etc.

3. When I press on the mouse icon in the Neighborhood, it says "Updating Web Pages" and then says "this may take awhile". Then when I try to move to the next screen showing the HTML pages for teleportation, it won't go anywhere. Or when I go to the address book page, it shows no web pages at all -- it says "empty album".

There are several reasons for this problem. If you are on Windows NT 4.0, for example, playing Sims at work thinking you were smart enough to patch this game on to Windows NT where it isn't supposed to run, NOW you're going to see how it REALLY doesn't work. Basically, you can't teleport from Windows NT. The same can be true of certain lap-tops. Windows ME could be a problem, too, even if you got the game to run on it. Another reason might be due to lack of sufficient memory to update the pages. You need to go into "MY COMPUTER" and right-click on drive c: to see how much space is left. Go in and delete unnecessary files in order to free up memory. Teleportation eats up a lot of memory, so if you're near the edge, consider upgrading your memory.

Yet another reason has to do with what drive the game installs on and how it pulls up folders needed for teleporting -- try the manual pull-up recommended above.

We've also found that when the game on the Neighborhood Screen is constantly saying "Updating Web Pages" and stalling i.e. letting you know it is doing this with a message, that's usually a bad sign. This is one of those game functions that also defies logical explanation, since you can't trigger it as a user, it seems random, and it doesn't run when you think it should! In Hot Date, it often seems to stop and update the "Townies" page although nothing has changed in the Hot Date lots. Normally, in fact, the game updates web pages automatically when you save the game, and doesn't tell you about it with this message! When it starts telling you like this, and especially if your game crashes during the "Updating Web Pages" function, it's usually a sign that it is struggling with some inner issues. We have never known this to end well, so it might be time to save your families in separate "SAFETY" files on the desktop and reinstall all your games at this juncture, in chronological order, first cleaning up everything and using the Registry clean-up now offered in "get cool stuff" at www.thesims.ea.com

4. I can't log on to the teleporter. It won't even let me log on!

Since the onset of Hot Date and the EA server upgrade, many people have found themselves locked out of the system. Make sure you can still log on to the home page normally at www.thesims.ea.com and check "registration". You can try at this point to create a brand-new user-name under your original master name and use the new name to try teleportations -- this has seemed to work for some people.

Make sure your Internet connection is still good. Sometimes opening up the Sims Family Web Pages, which are in the form of an HTML page, will close down your Internet connection by shutting your browser on you. This is a really annoying thing that no Maxis or computer tech person will understand or believe when you tell them, because they rarely try to teleport, but it is really a factor because it is a known issue in Windows 98, a cache problem apparently whereby opening up jpegs or HTML pages closes your Internet browser which in turns closes your connection or prompts to ask you if you want to close it. Open up an extra IE window to calculate for this problem.

Also try "refresh" and re-logging, making sure that you have your password typed in properly.

5. It still won't open up! What do I do!

Do you have AOL? There are many reported problems for people trying to teleport with an AOL browser. Don't use the actual AOL browser "go to" line, just use your AOL Internet connection to go to MSN or some other page and then try teleporting. Better yet, install an Internet Explorer browser and try with that after you log on with AOL. These are available for free on Microsofts' IE pages. If you are still getting an "hour glass" and you just can't log on or can't find pages, chances are very high that the Maxis/EA server is just busy or broken. Try again just before and just after the hour, they sometimes re-set servers on the hour.

6. I'm getting the screen that says "CONNECT" and then it is just hanging. Should I wait?

NO! It means it's not working. If it does not connect and start showing you the FAM file and the rest of the files transporting, visible in a blue line, then the EA server may be down. To alleviate your frustration, try closing all the pages and re-starting again from the game and refreshing. Also try closing your Internet connection and re-dialing or re-opening it again, sometimes you just don't have a good Internet line that handshakes with the Maxis server. Keep trying. Note that this error is reportedly the most frequently and usually correlates with problems with the EA server being busy or down.

7. I log-on, I connect, the teleportation starts, the blue bar is moving along, and then all of a sudden I get "Error During Teleportation". What's going on?!

If you don't see other user messages about this on the BBS, if you are trying at a less busy time, then your Internet connection should be checked to see if it timed out on you or there was a bad file. If you are teleporting with 56K or less, you can't expect an optimum experience. We find that the slower the connection, the more custom files, the bigger the house, the more likely you will experience errors because the teleportation just cracks en route or times out. In fact, there is no real reason why you shouldn't be able to teleport with 56K -- we have done it many times -- but given the wackiness of this server, it could be a factor. To check whether the problem is on your side, run FileCop (available from the Maxis site under the "get cool things" section) in order to eliminate any flawed custom-made files like skins or wallpapers. You can also create a test house by creating a family of just one Sim, putting her on a lot with just one cactus, a table, a telephone and a dream (like catfitz's Single Mom from Hell!) and trying to teleport this very stripped-down, slim family. If it doesn't teleport and you still get errors, chances are the Maxis side is the problem. Just keep trying. Re-connect and start over, maybe it will work.

8. The teleportation completes, says "Teleportation Complete," I click on the "finish" button with joy, and then I get the "Processing" screen. I wait, and nothing ever happens!

And nothing will. Unless you want to end up like David the Bot Boy and his Teddy, who waited 2000 years for the Blue Fairy to come and make him real (freezing to death in the process) close this screen down and start over. The "Processing Hang" is one of the most frequently cited error messages. Waiting for more than 5-10 minutes seldom makes sense. If you look down at the little modem connection icon on your task bar, or use whatever means your system has to "check connection" and see that it is not green or "on" and moving files, give up. What happens here is that either the Server is busy, down, or it has a glitch in dealing with that final step.

9. My family seemed to teleport, but when I went to look for it on the Maxis/EA site, it wasn't there! Where is it?

It's in cyberspace or jammed on the EA server en route. It isn't ever going to become visible on the site even if you search for it manually. You probably got jammed at the "Processing" stage or something else happened, so you'll have to start over. If you can't see it on the "Exchange" page where it says "view/edit my families" it isn't there and will never be there.

10. But when I go to teleport this family again, it says I already have that family up on the Exchange when I press view/edit on the teleportation screen! It must be there if the system is finding it in "view/edit"!

But we told you, and you didn't want to believe us. Your family is not visible on the Exchange and never will be, and you will never find it. You can't see it, can you? It's not there. It's trapped in cyberspace. So delete it here at the Teleportation screen under "view/edit" to give it another chance -- leave it there can merely create another "Processing Hang" in our experience.

11. I did all that, and I am still getting "Processing" forever, and it still looks like my family isn't there.

Try teleporting from 2:00-5:00 a.m. EST. Generally people in California stop teleporting around 11:00 p.m. at the latest, their time. From then on, they give us people on the East Coast a chance -- before other people on the East Coast figure out that this is now the optimum time! Outside the USA, this 2:00-7:00 a.m. EST window is your best bet, it's less busy. So if you live in Australia, no wonder you can teleport!!!

12. I did teleport my family successfully, I got the category description page, I typed in my description and clicked "finished" but I don't see my family.

Your family will take approximately 15 minutes to show up on the "New Families" list on a good day. If you are impatient and want to make sure it is up there, go to the Exchange section of www.thesims.ea.com and click on "View/Edit My Families" and "Family Album" to see if your web pages got up there all right. If after an hour you don't see them, and can't find them in "new families" or through a manual search, then chances are they are not really there and you will have to re-teleport. Sorry.

13. But I distinctly typed in my description, and now I see my family has NO description!

A very common occurance. Why don't you just be glad you got the dang thing up there and be done with it?! The teleporter often leaves out these descriptions you type in. One thing you should be sure of is keeping a little more space left at the end than it seems to give you. if you type right up to the limit, it can get lost on you. Also, if you use symbols like " or / or * it can just wind up leaving the whole thing out altogether. Don't risk it.

14. I still keep getting error messages? What else can I do?

Many SimMasters will tell you to download and/or reinstall the teleportation patch; it can solve problems for a small percentage of people. There is a game patch that is advised for certain versions of the game right on the Exchange page, and you can try that, which has been there for more than a year through House Party and Hot Date, but that is NOT the same thing as the "Teleportation Patch" once placed on the site as an LL patch and is no longer available, ostensibly incorporated into further expansions. You can try this patch, available at http://simalbums.tripod.com/simalbums/id6.html, but let us tell you the real story: this doesn't work in probably 90 percent of the time to fix teleportation woes.

15. It won't teleport, and I'm getting really mad! What else can I try?!

Another frequent SimMaster advice is to try to download a family instead of uploading a family. See if you "prime the pump" and get the java scripts working by going in the other direction. Try it. You'll see that downloads go faster and smoother because they have far less files to transport. Downloading, as distinct from uploading, from the Maxis/EA server, can prove several things -- that you are a recognized user-id, that the server does work after a fashion, and so on. OK, that's that. Still can't teleport and still getting messages like "error validating user name"? Now didn't we warn you that it wasn't going to make any difference?!

16. I keep getting a screen that says my family is too big. It tells me that it has too many photos. What's going on? What do I do? And hey, I already cut my photos down to 20 and it still tells me they are too big! What's WITH this thing?!

Well, it's not just the photos, the jpegs in "Photo Album" in your folders and inside the "photos" in your game, but let's deal with these photos first. In our experience, anything more than 50 photos of mainly small-size, high-resolution and medium-size high- or medium-resolution is going to give you trouble. Sure, you can do 90-115 photos in small and medium low resolution -- we've done it --but that's pushing it. It means your readers will have a hard time waiting for the downloads of all those pages and thumbing through them, and your photos will not be that beautiful at low resolution. So why not do yourself and the Exchange browsers a favor -- keep your Family Album to about 50 or 60 tops. Ideally, even 34 frames would be best. 34 seems to be a very nice number, good for teleportations (well under the 500 KB level) and many of the most popular stories are around this number, due not only to people's attention spans but the slowness in turning pages in the albums as they upload.

17. I took all these large-size, high-resolution pictures. Is there a way I can go back and reduce them and copy them into the photos?

No. You're stuck, unless you have PSP 7.0 or one of these other fancier photo editing utilities out there which enable you to take a jpeg, redo it, reduce it in size and pixels, and save it so that it still fits in the Maxis game. Our recommendation if you are not a computer graphics artist: save your giant photo jpegs in a separate folder, to remember them by, and then delete all but about 3-4 of them from the game, which is all the average teleport can stand IF under 30 other medium rez jpegs. Some people get 10 up there. Maybe you'll be lucky, maybe not. But you'll have to re-shoot those scenes in order to get them down to the right size. There's no other way to convert them except in a fancier graphics editing program, sorry. Well, gee, this is just a game, get your Sims off their duffs and go re-shoot the scene!

17. But how do I know how many pictures to delete in order to get the size I need to teleport? It doesn't tell you.

Yes. That's one of our major beefs. You can learn the size, but it will take a little bit of your own calculation. Look at your Photo Album in the game, and it will tell you how many bytes go with each size of photo, from large to small, and each resolution of photo, from high and small to big. Customized photos are also problematic sometimes for the exchange and eat up bytes. Don't expect your teleportation to work like a Swiss watch with a lot of customized-size photos.

Now take those photos, and multiply, e.g. 50 medium at medium rez is X bytes, etc. That should give you a rough calculation. You can also NOT to your Photo Album folder, but to c:/programs/maxis/thesims/userdata/web pages and inside "web page," right-click only on that family's folder, and select "properties" which will then show you the number of megabytes in that folder. If this figure is higher than 3, and your have a FAM file higher than 3, you may have teleportation problems because 500 is often the limit for slower connections.

Generally, teleports become problematic after 500 KB, we find, including photos and pictures. Maxis doesn't tell you the limit, and you see people with 700 and even 900 KB photo albums and houses up there, but if you get down under 600 KB even, you will quicken your teleport and avoid the "too fat" message.

18. Now try to teleport your family. If you get the "family too big" message again, it's back to the drawing board, and cutting and renumbering until you get the magic number, usually at least 6-10 at a time, in order to make a difference (doing one at a time rarely works and is very frustrating).

BUT, here's where you have to put on your rubber gloves, get your scalpel, and go deep into your game innards. YOU CANNOT FIX TOO LARGE FAMILIES ONLY INSIDE THE PHOTO ALBUM IN THE GAME!!!!

These files are not the ones that teleport! The files that move up the sluggish blue line to teleportation are inside http://c:/programs/maxis/thesims/userdata/webpages/[family name] So you go in, say, "Newbie" and look at how many scrapbook_popup files you have. Let's say you already deleted the number of photos in your album inside the game to 50, but here, you see scrapbook_popup files numbering up to 100. That means, somehow, despite exiting your family and saving your game, it failed to delete these old scrapbook pages. Press on "scrapbook_popup1" Now you see that there are only pages say 1-50. Page through them and make sure that no. 50 really is your new last page.

Now CAREFULLY delete everything above your cut-off number. The game organizes these files not by actual numeric order, but in batches, like this scrapbook_popup1, scrapbook_popup 10, scrapbook_popup100 -- see how all the 1s, 2s, 3s, are put in batches like that, not in numerical order? So carefully save only 1-50 and delete others, being careful not to accidently delete a "5" when you are in the process of deleting a "55". Look sharp!

19. You're still not done. After checking your work here to make sure nothing has been deleted by mistake (don't worry, the entire set of files can be regenerated even if you delete everything merely by re-saving your game with the Photo Album files you have in the game), then go into a even deeper level of your game which is c:/programs/maxis/thesims/userdata/webpages/familyGFX.

Family GFX -- who knows what GFX stands for! -- contains the actual Photo Album jpegs which will now be lifted up and fitted into the HTML template with the captions to your photos which are created in scrapbook_popup explained above. Together, these two sets of files are what actually teleport to the Exchange. IF they are out of order or mismanaged, you will see mess-ups or nothing but red xs.

Here, too, you need to delete everything beyond the 50 or so maximum number, and double check by pressing through the scrapbook_popup HTML pages to see if everything is in order.

20. I did all that, and are you telling me that I still can't teleport! Because it keeps giving me errors!!!

Sometimes, the teleporter acts up, doesn't tell you your family is too big, and then gives you a last-minute error messages AFTER you've teleported a normal-sized set of files and that seem to resist explanation -- and only reducing photos to 30 or so seems to work in this case.

But it's not only jpegs of photos that make your family too fat. Ah-hah, they didn't tell you that, did they when they told you to cut photos as a solution in the error message!!! A large building could also be the problem! Go into your userdata files for the neighborhood level of that family. Find the "EXPORT" file. Inside there is a "FAM" file. Right-click on it and open up "properties" to see what the size is. If you see something over 500KB, chances are that this house file (with your construction) combined with your jpegs of over 100KB could be making it too fat. SAVE THIS FAM FILE and also the PUB file on the desk top or outside the game files. Put them aside in another folder somewhere. Now go back in your game and delete some of your buildings, especially those out of bounds. Save, and check the size again and keep checking until it is down below 400-450 KB or so.

21. I KEEP GETTING "TOO BIG" OR NOTHING IS WORKING! WHAT THE HELL!

Now you have to deal with your custom files. The hard, plain, flat fact is that if you teleport a family without any custom wallpapers, tiles or skins, it will just teleport faster and better and you have a higher chance of success. *EVEN IF YOU DIDN'T GET THE 'TOO BIG' MESSAGE, CUSTOM FILES COULD BE DELAYING OR PREVENTING YOUR TELEPORT.* No one will tell you this, it doesn't seem possible, given all those luscious, fat, user-design-larded families on the exchange, given the seeming capacity of at least 500 KB, but that's for those people, and you're you, and you have a problem, so you're going to have to reduce. No, it's not fair, but do you want Exchange glory or not? Go into your game and strip off the custom-designed wallpapers and tiles. People will still see them in your album photos and you can credit the designer and tell people the URL where to get them. Ditto your user skins -- get your Sims to change into some other duds. Try stripping out half your custom-mades and checking "FAM" and also trying to re-teleport and maybe you'll be lucky. If you're not, take everything out completely down to the bone, and teleport. *But don't worry about custom-made objects! They don't teleport in any event so just leave 'em alone. AuntLynelle Sim recommends even deleting custom objects and replacing every single one with Maxis not only as a teleportation aide but as a politeness to the person who downloads your house and gets a nasty crash or a "missing objects" error message and wierd rooms without stuff for their trouble.

For extra good measure, even though we don't know if this is relevant or not (we don't know how the system codes the presence of the Maxis default objects), we take out large expensive objects like the robot. Maybe they take up more bytes? Just in case.

If none of this works, keep in mind that "Family Too Big" is also an error message that can come when the Maxis server is busy or down, although more often you'll get "Processing" hang or no log-on.
What to do if you just can't teleport? As we noted above, it could be a memory, or game, or patch, or issue related to you. But if it's related to Maxis, what can you do but try again another time?

22. Somebody on the BBS said that if you build out of bounds, you create teleportation problems, and worse, you cause game crashes for some downloaders. And I heard that if you move as much as a default shrub out of place, it won't teleport later. Is that true?

We know of many out-of-bounds houses on the Exchange that teleported just fine, obviously, and also have had thousands of downloads without any trouble. But you have trouble, don't you? So try to eliminate every factor you can. You can simplify your house construction, re-build, take structures off the "out-of-bounds" areas (you must have used the cheat move_objects on to build out there!) -- all of these can eat up bytes and affect teleportation and cause error messages. But it's just not true about the default shrub. Go ahead, move it. Move it again. It won't affect anything. OK, OK, OK if you're superstitious, don't move it. Oh, you don't remember where it was? Well, sheesh, you're out of luck...

23. I keep trying to teleport. I'm turning blue. I'm pulling my hair out. Nothing is working. What else can I do?

Try your teleportation again at least once before and once after the hour. In the past, Maxis people have noted that they set and reset the system on the hour. It is sometimes set to reject teleportations that have failed until after the hour in order to prevent frustrated teleporters from re-teleporting and jamming up the system, apparently. It's not clear if they still do this, but to avoid frustration, it's worth trying at quarter of and quarter after the hour, during non-peak times like 5:00 a.m. EST.

21. I have this beautiful family of 300 photos. Can I ever see them all up on the Exchange?

This 300 photos in the game's Photo Album is what is making "Updating WebPages" crash the game. Hot Date does this even more!

If you having "updating web pages" that leads either to a crash to the desk top or a failure to update or repeated failures to teleport, then that means you simply have too many photos in your album. We've made families with as many as 300 and 400 photos in the album on high-memory high-RAM computers even, and we've found that the picture cache memory inside "My Computer" and in the game are taxed beyond belief, and then "Updating Web Pages" simply doesn't work!. The only solution is to go in and delete (after you've made work copies, of course) all those excessive numbers and bring it down to under 50.

Then, to make Part I, Part II, etc. of your story, using up all the photos, you'll have to renumber as instructed in "How to Fix Up Your Messed Up Album. Make sure you renumber 0000-0050 for each "Part" or it won't work. If you have several user names and LL or HP, copy the FAM and PUB files from the EXPORT folder for that family, then open the game and shoot one picture, the slot in "Part II" and teleport Part II under another one of your user names, and so on until you've got them all done (if you have the stamina!)

ANOTHER OPTION: Save your FAM and PUB files so the construction is saved, and delete your whole building manually. Evict your families back up to the "Make A Family" Screen. And bulldoze the lot. Then bring the family right back into that lot, without building a house. Usually evicted families do not lose the albums that go with their families if you move them right back into the lot where they were, and don't do anything else. Make sure you don't bulldoze the lot, that could eliminate the album. Make a copy of the photo album files before evicting and relocating as a back up.

Is the lot possibly corrupted, messing up the game and then also messing up teleports since the server refuses to accept a messed-up, corrupted FAM file? If you are experienced and know what you are doing, save your photos and FAM and PUB files, then paste them into the "Import" file in "Userdata" and start the family anew on a clear space on another level. Move the old album photos in that family's file -- it may require re-numbering again, so snap one shot first to see how the game is numbering. You could also start a new family with the same exact name, characters and skins but don't build anything, and just put the photo albums files from the old family in -- but you will still have to renumber the photos, because even with the same family name, the game numbers each new creation on each lot, and family numbers do not correspond with lot numbers.

Doing all of these "autoimmune" fixes, as I call them, might get you lucky enough to work around a corrupt lot that is preventing your teleportation, an admittedly rare problem.

24. OK, It's 5:00 a.m., I've tried everything, I'm red-eyed and angry. Nothing I do works. I'm really in despair. Now what? Should I buy a new computer? Should I change my ISP or speed up my connection?

That might do the trick. We'd be happy to pay any company $2000 that would provided us a complete, bug-free package of computer, ISP, and Sim games all of which are compatible and lead to trouble-free teleportation!

At this point, you might want to do what we've done twice now, save all our gamedata/userdata files in a separate SAFETY folder on the desk top and reinstall all the games. It beats starting at the "Processing" screen...

We think the real problem is the Maxis server, which is just plain silly if it can't deal with more than a lousy 10.5 megs of familes a day. Results to our survey indicate that people of all kinds of connections, speeds, geographical regions, etc. etc. have problems, so if you tried all these steps here and can't teleport, then join our rank of protesters.

But there is another way! You can put your photos up on a photo storage site. Try www.tripod.com or www.ofoto.com or www.PhotoPoint.com or www.clupbphoto.com or others you find and like. In our experience, tripod is the best for web-page creators, ofoto is the best for large uploads and long captions, and photopoint or clubphoto, which may cost $29/year, have the highest quality photos -- it really makes your Sim pictures look real! You can then post the URL to the photo sites for your friends on the BBS to view your album. To learn more about alternatives to the Maxis/EA Exchange, click the link below.
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Write me with questions to dyerbrookME@juno.com or siminalist@yahoo.com