It's cool, your not disrespecting anyone. your inputs and advice are very much appreciated. I have just seen too many coins reach for the hard fork option when it really isn't necessary most of the time. we need to always remember that whenever we hard fork, individuals, exchanges and pools, statistic websites etc that are not up to date are effectively locked out of the system until they update..  with a coin like Karma there are so many people who disappear for 6 months and then come back and yell WTF when their wallet is not working.

We also need to acknowledge the economic reality that if a coin is too much hassle for an exchange to support then they will drop it. Cryptsy just recently had problems with their Karma wallet which took them weeks to fix, they have fixed it now but I wonder how long it would take them to update their wallet if we hard forked. I don't like the idea of cryptsy's (or any other exchange's) karma wallet going offline again because they were too busy or simply couldn't be bothered fixing it...

I'm also wondering if those people who are unable to sync are still having the problem after they update their karma peers.dat file from someone who has kept it updated. I know its only a band-aid fix but it seems to have worked well in the past.

P.S. I am not against fixing the problem.. just against hard forking.. so if we have a temporary fix that works for now then we could always change the magic bytes to something more appropriate the next time we actually need to do a hard fork.