Reply to @Accipiter: Let's move this to Technical Questions.
Regards,
Ted

Reply to @STB65: Sorry about the abrupt response. I was on cell and my phone is antiquated (think: crank handle on the side).
The balance seems to be between making the fund accessible (which they're happy to do) and diverting their time and attention to beefing up assets (which they won't do because they don't enjoy the activity and it's not good for their shareholders). And so, they pursued the two share-class strategy: one with easy availability for folks who prefer supermarkets (albeit at the price of a marketing fee) and one with lower annual expenses (albeit with less convenience - either TF through a supermarket or a separate set of paperwork if you purchase it directly).
CCA are working on refining a fund screener. Depending on how you approach it, you'll end up with either compact tabular results (for multi-fund searches) or reports with a bit more explanatory text (for single fund searches). It's tricky and a bit demanding (both on the team and on the server) because we're trying to guide folks toward questions (roughly: what are the different ways of thinking about risk and how much of it will I be exposed to?) that other folks prefer to avoid. Part of the answer to that question will certainly require access to relevant benchmark data and we're looking at presenting a variety of them with each report.
Browsing Accipiter's threads, above, offer both a sneak peak and the opportunity to participate in shaping the process.
For what all of that is worth,
David

Reply to @STB65: on the 12b1 fee, you might check point 4 in my original note.
On benchmarks, our prototype reports - the stuff Chip, Charles and Accipiter (CCA) are working on - include a medley of them.
David

Reply to @Accipiter:
Definitely not 100's of funds on one page, but it would be nice if there is a way to export the results to a spreadsheet.

@Accipiter : I think I would prefer to get all the result unless doing so will be too time consuming and too much load on the site. Assuming all the results obtained I would like to be able to sort on columns or be able to filter down on thise results by refining query or entering a sub-query on results. This can go several levels deep.
Actually one other feature would be extremely useful: once the funds are screened add the selected ones to a Cart and at checkout (or whatever you would call) display the selected properties /details of those funds in a report page.

David- since Accipiter is looking for a decent amount of feedback (and rightfully so) before jumping into a lot of work, perhaps you could post a "Notice" for a week or so to give the issue fair exposure?
Just a thought- OJ

Reply to @Accipiter: I have such faith in you!
Fairly imbalanced,
David

Reply to @Accipiter: (Not that we have an ulterior motive behind such an innocent question.)

Hi Anna,
Yes, I looked at that date path, too. That was a strange and new period, eh?
The old clock sure moves too fast most days for me.
The date page I pulled was more to the one month after the market bottom. I am sure there was a lot of interesting text within those thread lines. :)
I am most pleased with the evolution and expansion of the MFO format. Accipiter's fine addition of the Falcon's Eye and Navigator have had a lot of use for me. The expansion of what is able to placed into the the text pages and the international connections that are allowed.
There are too many areas to say a thank you.
'Course, the best still remains the kind folks who have brought forth and maintain the site; and all of the gracious people who share their time and wisdom.
Take care of you and yours,
Catch

Hi, hank.
The summary view page was one of the plug-ins built by Accipiter that we shut off last weekend in order to conserve server resources. If things seem to remain stable for a little while, I'd be willing to try turning it on again on a weekend when I'm around to monitor things closely. I suspect it will work just fine, but I need to be able to watch and quickly turn it off if there's trouble.
Hang in there!
chip

David, bless you for all your work, AND the whole crew: Chip, Accipiter, James, et al.

Dear friends,
MFO was taken off-line by our hosting company for a several hours on Saturday morning. They concluded that we'd generated extraordinary server load over the past couple days. We got a warning note on 7:45 a.m., suggesting that we review our data demands and consider a dedicated server. Ninety minutes later we were taken offline because we threatened the stability of the server which housed us. Chip, later joined by James, one of her IT staff colleagues, and Accipiter, worked to resolve the challenge and reason with the server folks. By early afternoon we were back online.
The question of server load is a bit tough for us to analyze because it's not necessarily related to the traffic we draw or the number of pages you view. One bad bit of computer code might generate a huge demand on a server by asking it to endlessly repeat the same action (think about Abbott and Costello's old "who's on first" routine). Chip and Accipiter reviewed our database files and disabled a number of plug-ins, especially those related to the board software. We've requested heightened monitoring from our hosting company - both so that we could create a baseline for normal server demand but also as an early warning system for demand spikes. We haven't yet heard back from them on whether they'll cooperate.
What's next? Chip and James, her colleague, have signed us up for a Cloud Flare account - a cloud-based service which has the prospect of noticeably improving our speed though not directly addressing the problem of downtime, have created a backup copy of MFO and will soon be able to test other server options. Together those actions create the possibility for us to migrate to a dedicated and better-monitored server. It will take some time and will incur some additional operating expense, but we think both are well worth it if the result is a more stable site that's always available to you.
So, regrets for any inconvenience and thanks to Chip, James and Accipiter for making a massive effort on no notice, on a day they'd normally have off.
As ever,
David

Sorry, guys. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to embed an html table. That was the source of the Alcatraz ethos in the draft posting. If only Charles (or chip or Accipiter) were here, they'd make it all better!
David

Reply to @VirtueRunsDeep: Well, on my old Mac, it's right there under "Firefox" in the top main menu bar, the very first menu item.
Actually, the complete path would be Firefox/Preferences/Privacy/Show Cookies. "Preferences" brings up another smaller window, and "Privacy" is one of the menu items within that smaller window.
I notice that Accipiter just posted additional info, I'm guessing probably for Windows, so try whatever one works for you. I sure hope this helps!
Regards-

Reply to @Accipiter: :D i see my ugly mug now. Thanks. My daughter made that "avatar" of me on some website when she was just 5. So I take it very personally.

Reply to @Accipiter: Hmmm...right here right now I'm still seeing my entire bust. Snipping and pasting for your reference...

Reply to @Accipiter: Went to IE control panel and typed in www.mutualfundobserver.com to enable session cookie to always allow.
Regards,
Ted

Reply to @Accipiter:
Thanks, Accipiter! Fixed it.
chip

Reply to @Accipiter: Yes, but did you find the one labeled "Charles' Baloney"?
Working on it.
David

Dear friends,
Just a word about Charles's much sought-after data. We'd been hopeful of releasing it as a searchable database with our August 1 issue. Both of the folks who do programming for us - Accipiter and Andrew, one of chip's IT colleagues - have been swamped by things that are, frankly, noticeably more pressing than this project. We've got the most recent data loaded and a rudimentary search and report function (enter the ticker for the oldest share class and get a dozen bits of data), but we haven't yet been able to integrate Charles's "oldest share class" utility, a more flexible search or a report that incorporates explanatory text.
What we do have is the data in a spreadsheet. As an experiment, I pulled the data for the 420 "Great Owl" funds - all of those in the top 20% of their peer groups for periods of three years plus - into a single, smaller spreadsheet and provided two sorts. The top table is sorted by fund category and the second one is sorted by fund name. I wanted to see how useful folks found this format. While I remain a bit concerned about piracy, I do want to make useful information available as quickly and clearly as I can.
If you want to play with the data and haven't used Excel much, I'd mostly suggest that you save the original against the prospect that one of your experiments substantially scrambles things.
With respect,
David