Forum change... admins please consider
 

Hi guys,

I'm appealing to the admins of this forum in the hope of having a small change made. Currently the attachment limit for images is 640x480 in size. However, the file size limit for them is also 1 meg. How about raising the resolution limit to 1024x768? It is impossible to post a 1 meg 640x480 image right now, and I think the higher resolution limit will be hugely beneficial to posting setup photos. :)

What do you think?


Thanks,
Aragon

here is the deal; every time the page is opened, the images appear >> this takes bandwidth. Since this forum doesn't require a registration to view, bots can also view the forum (and this happens constantly, check the who's online button on the bottom of the screen in the forum overview)

a file however isn't opened every time the thread is opened, only at request.

another thing; quite some users use a 1024X768 screen resolution. if you make the pics the same resolution the screen isn't only vertical, but also horizontal out of view.

If you want to post pictures larger than 640X480, you can post them, but you need to find a place to host them yourself.

Hope this explains why the limitation is set to 640X480.

Free image host here, easy to use:
www.imageshack.us

I guess images could be hosted outside, but that makes posting more complicated. I figured if the file size limit were currently 1 meg there wouldn't be a problem with upping the resolution limit...

What about limiting bot crawling with robots.txt? I see there is no robots.txt file on this site...

Hate to butt in here, but.... What do Bots do? Are they mining for email addresses and stuff? Or is this search engines trying to find keywords or something?

Can someone educate me?

BTW Id love to have a larger picture resolution. I am using www.photobucket.com to host and they work pretty well. Free too.

they normally enrich the search results for search engines.

some of them scan for email addresses as well.

It should be possible to stop them from pulling the attachments in posts. Just add this to robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum/attachment.php

That will stop search bots from pulling all attachments completely!

So how's about that resolution limit increase? :) ;)

still; part two of my first reply is important..

Bandwidth wouldn't be affected with resolution change as long as the filesize limit was kept the same. The 1MB limit for a decently compressed GIF or JPG is actually very large. Still, some people do use smaller monitors, so maybe increase it to 800x600 max if anything. Or use a script to scale the image to the user monitor size automatically if the image is too big. :)

About the bot thing: yeah, there are always a lot of bots crawling around. Everytime I look at the "who's online" list, about half (or more) are bots. Usually, they provide a decent service by updating their search engine with the useful information found here, but those email bots really irritate me. Too bad there wasn't some code on the server that would sense the malicious email scanner bots and send a self-destruct signal back. :017:

Modern browsers all resize images to fit the window on the fly (ie6+, firefox 1.5+). I think you will find that over 85% of the forum's viewers are using browsers that do that. To embed outside images would be potentially more harmful because without the forum restricting max resolution, what's to stop someone from embedding an image even larger than 1024x768? An image that is being embedded into a page that is already taking up some screen area, and an image that does not get resized on the fly by modern browsers. I've seen threads here where you have to scroll horizontally because posters embedded huge images into their posts - that instance is far worse than what you are concerned about IMHO.

But even an increase to 800x600 would be great.

I don't mean to come across as argumentative or rude. Just trying to make the forum better. :)

The bots can be controlled to a degree btw. Basically you need to setup stripped down sections of the forum and use the robots.txt file to restrict what they access. Have a look at how RCGroups handles them - they run similar forum software. More info on robots.txt can be read here.

This is true, but some disable the auto-resize function (like me). I personally don't like the pixelation which occurs when the browser resizes an image that way without any "smart" resizing - I'd rather take the scrolling. And, yes, there are people that link in larger images than they should, but that's the fault of the user, but does not impact forum bandwidth (or forum storage space) - which seems to be the major concern. Personally, if any image is larger than 800x600 (or thereabouts), I usually use a text link that opens the image instead of directly linking it in.

I would like the 800x600 also... other fourms have this and it make a little bigger pic on my bigger monitors :)

I have been shrinking my pics to @100kb... which is the limit for some other fourms. The 1MB is huge...too big imo if you are concerned about bandwidth.

A 800x600 200kb jpg is more than enough to get soem better detail.

Related Q: how do some of you guys get several pics in the post... mine are always thumbnails. ?

By hosting them ourselves (or on a site that allows it) and use this as a pointed to them;

[ img ] http: // www. server . com / pictures / pic001.jpg [/ img ]

Mike is also checking into a few pic options as well. I talked to him the other
day about it. So may be a few small changes in store.