Unlike many web pages, bandwidth isn’t the real bottleneck here. Eliminating or shrinking the big banner might help a little, but not by very much. The bottleneck is that the message board pages are dynamic, and have to be put together by the server before they can be sent off over the Internet to you. It’s the putting together of pages that takes up so much time, and it affects folks on broadband and modems about equally.
Umm…are you guys seeing a different banner than me? Because the big banner “tsdbanner.gif” is only 7kb. 
If they are, Anthracite, then somethin’ wacky’s going on for both of us, cause I see a 7kb banner too!
Maybe you and I have been moved to an elite cabal of people who get the low-bandwith banner 'cause of our valuable contributions?
:eek:
OMG! On the other hand, what if there’s a solid gold banner with an animated .gif of Cecil welcoming people that you and I can’t see but the important people CAN and we’re relegated to the “out” crowd!!! :eek:
Fenris
What, you guys can’t see that?
Don’t worry, I’ll take this up with Cecil next time we have lunch. Do the rest of you feel guilty because he always pays?
He told me just yesterday that he’d be back after labor day and take care of some of the crap going on around here. He was watching a ballgame though , so he couldn’t stick around. Hey all I did was give him a holler and byGod he spoke right up.
I take that doesn’t happen too often.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=202020
This is odd.
I download the tsd.gif banner on my Mac, hit “get info” and it says the file size is 132k.
I download it on a PC, check the “properties” and it’s 7k.
I’m sure there are wonderful opportunities here for droll and/or snarky comments, but it would be interesting to hear a logical explanation for this discrepancy.
Well, it is an LZW-compressed GIF, which means it’s actually “larger than life”. However, Irfanview reports its uncompressed size as being only 55.39kb, not 132kb.
And even if I convert it to a bitmap it’s only 55.39kb as well.
Sounds like a good GQ, if you ask me.
It has to do with the Mac file system. You aren’t seeing the actual file size, you are seeing the combined size of the data fork and resource fork. It’s waaaaaaaay bigger than the actual filesize, as you can tell.
I presume this is heresy, but wouldn’t the Reader get more income and pay more attention to this site if there were the occasional ad on the pages? I thought that was how people made money on websites if they weren’t selling anything. My son-in-law has a family website that has a link to Amazon and when anyone buys something by going to Amazon via that link, he gets a % of the cost of the item. And if the Reader were to pay more attention to the site because it produced some revenue, wouldn’t they be more likely to make it more accessable to the masses? Hell, they’ve had Cecil in the paper all these years. Right inside the cover. They know that people pick up the paper to read him, and so do the advertisers. I mean, ya know?
I remember simply not being able to post during peak times. At all. It could take five minutes to open up a thread, then another ten if you wanted to post something to it.
When the boards got faster I started posting a lot more. Maybe that’s why they’re slow again. I’m sorry.
Well, cuauhtemoc, it’s not just you…but when a lot of posters do exactly the same thing, yeah, that’s why the boards are slow again. People are searching and posting, which slows down the board.
Forkin’ data.
I think they should just combine the two and call it a data spork.