Lostgame said:
So, you're bitching about Sepwich's bandwidth?
This is what causes this obsessive avatar crap?
Well, partly. There is also the issue of people browsing on a dialup modem (Yes, they exist), people cluttering up the forums with needlessly big images, and people just not using compression. Any reasonable non-animated 128x128 image should be less than 10 KB. If it isn't, someone is just not using their compression right. Signatures, which you mention lower down, are not even POSSIBLE to regulate through the forum panels, and would end up totally unregulated. Where would you like to draw the line? 20 KB? 50 KB? 100 KB? 500 KB? I've seen all of those violated by some idiot at some point or another. These rules and regulations allow the administration to simply not have to worry about avatar and signature filesize at all, as the board is now scripted to do all of our work for us. Considering we're already kinda low on staff, that is a blessing for all of the people in charge, as it lowers our work load a lot.
So in short, no, bandwidth is not the only reason we limit avatars to 10 KB and have no image signatures entirely. It's just a reason that's easy to blame as an excuse. If you want the REAL reason, I suggest you go surf the SRB2 MB on a 28K dialup modem.
Lostgame said:
How about asking someone if they had hosting to move the forums?
Why, we're pretty tolerant, and Sepwich has been rather nice to us.
Lostgame said:
I have over 300 MB of space free, with unlimited bandwidth usage for the month, but instead of asking me or anyone else...
The SRB2 forum database alone is currently 626 MB. That's not even counting the other stuff we host on here. What was the bandwidth statistic for the Final Demo download on Cutter again, AJ? 900 GB down in one month? The SRB2 community sucks down an absolutely incredible amount of resources. We don't want to compound it any more than we absolutely need to.
Lostgame said:
You just complain about bandwidth usage?
Geez, people. You're smarter than that.
No, it's called "conservation". We shouldn't use any more bandwidth than we need to use. I mean, why drive a gas guzzling SUV when you could drive a hybrid when gas is 3 bucks a gallon? We don't NEED fancy avatars. They don't really add anything to the forum. So instead, it's much more desirable to give everyone a lesson in image compression and save everyone download time. Who knows? Maybe they'll take the stuff they learned and apply it to their own websites, speeding up their downloads there.
Lostgame said:
I will more than happily host the SRB2 forums on my server.
More than gladly.
And I will more than gladly remove these pathetic avatar and sig restrictions.
More than gladly.
Anytime, peoples. Just ask.
"But my homepage is already set to these forums!"
Easy redirecting page.
That will be like, 10 KB. So it will save bandwidth.
While I graciously appreciate the offer, we are not currently looking for hosting at this time. For all the flak we give Sepwich for downtimes and other inconveniences, the people who give us our bandwidth here are good people, who I know and trust with the information located on their server and do their best to keep me informed as to what is happening on the server. You can buy more bandwidth and more powerful servers, but you can't buy nice people to work with when talking to the people in charge. That's priceless.