I’m not sure how many people are interested in the archive aspects of the board, but a surefire way around this problem (board was down today for a time) is to prune the excess pages of the forums. Not suggesting the powers that be aren’t well aware of this already, but I’d say the front nine or ten pages of a given forum is plenty of archived material, opposed to the 30-40 back pages currently allotted space. The Philosophy forum holds posts dating back nearly four years ago, for example.
Sounds like a great idea and also losing the avatar. Hum, location solitude, must be nice as I deal with hundreds of students many peers, and administrators on a daily basis. By the end of the day, I enjoy my classical music, a couple of glasses of wine and the solitude. It is such a shame that an English prof. has to try and incorporate basic history and geography into the lesson plans as many students do not even know where France is, or somewhat close dates to historic events. I envy you solitude. Think, reflect and try to understand the insanity of so many events.
Oh, hell, good question. I might not know what the hell I’m talking about after all. I assumed the overall size of the site determined how much bandwidth was used.
It’s a pillar of my personal philosophy that we’re perpetually in solitude. It’s always just you and your surroundings, whether those surroundings contain other people or not.
EDIT: For those unfamilar with net protocol: linking your avatar or pics directly from the source without permission (i.e. using their bandwidth) is considered stealing. Placing your avatar or pics on a free hosting site, is fine.
Actually, given the combination of your post count and that enormous gaudy sig of yours, every time you post it probably costs ben like 10 bucks. He is probably doing naughty and depraved things to support your posting habits.
you knave.
I’d also like to suggest sigs be restricted to one (or two) lines. Who wants to see the same 6-8 lines of nonsense over and over and over again – especially when the reply is often a f*king smiley or a two-word answer?
If you can’t say anything funny, intelligent or provoking in one line, then adding another dozen is not going to help.
(I added an EDIT to my above post just in case you meant legal remote linking. Funnily enough, I’ve just been researching tools to stop people linking to my sites without permission then this came up.)
Thanks for your suggestions folks. I’m astonished by the possible 50% cut in bandwidth by cutting out avatars. I’m going to trial this to see the effect. The majority of the bandwidth usage seems to be coming from googlebot sprawling the whole site, something that needs to be done if we want ILP to be available from search engines.
Ben, I’d be extremely surprised if the bandwidth dropped by 50% simply by removing avatars – but its difficult to say.
If a person views 100 pages, theoretically, he would only need to download each avatar once (because they are saved to cache and reused over and over for that session). If 100 people drop by and view one page then move on, that’s 100 downloads of the same avatar(s). So it depends on how many unique visits are made.
Text sigs, on the other hand, while significantly smaller than images, need to be downloaded each time for each page impression (they’re not cached). The new adverts also need need to be loaded afresh, each and every page. Both of these will add to the bandwidth amounts very quickly.
Anyway, since you have turned the avatars off, we’ll soon find out.
PS: It seems Uccisore is remotely linking his God damn awful Godzilla sig so it shouldn’t be a bandwidth problem for ILP – just for ILPers who pay according to how much they download (and the aesthetically sensitive)
I’m pretty sure we limit the maximum avatar size we allow you to upload to a mere 6kb which means that removing the ability to do this will not help us. The problem is being resolved by google engineers as we speak (googlebot consumes roughly 55GBs of bandwidth per month).
P.s. Km_wotsit has it correct regarding file cacheing.
Haha! You will observe, thanks to my skill and ingenuity uploading to photobucket, that my avatar is intact and looks all the more glorious for the lack of competition.
That was my true plan, now none (well, except Uccisore) can stand between me and pictoral dominance of ILP. Wherever you see my shining sign, tremble, brief textual mortals!
You can still have an avatar, just has to be linked from imageshack or whatever. I’m have withdrawal symptoms from not seeing your egg already! Get it back please!!!
I assumed the overall size of the site determined how much bandwidth was used.
