Hey, Smilie Masters, Smilie Hunters, Hypertext Masters and all other Graphic-Happy Dopers!
[Soapbox ON – I got no hat]
Could y’all tone it down a little.
O.K. I don’t mean those who use the internal smilies. (though their overuse can be a bit irritating at times) I mean the folks who use the img tag to link to an outside graphic. You’re stealing bandwidth from the people running the sites. It cost them money each time a picture is called up, and viewed by anyone who loads the thread. That’s probably thousands of loads a day. Anyway, this has been brought to the attention of the board administration, and I hope there isn’t a moratorium on graphic use.
[Soapbox OFF]
I don’t think there are thousands of people reading any one thread. There’s a couple hundred regular posters, and probably about as many lurkers. And nobody reads every thread.
Often times the outside graphics are from the poster’s own site. Other times they are simply free sites. If the webmaster didn’t want his images linked to, he has ways he can get around it. (Try linking to any image on a member page of xoom.com and you’ll get nothing but an xoom logo, no matter what the image is.)
I really think you’re making a big deal out of nothing.
I just checked out a few web site hosting services. Every single one I looked at offered “unlimited traffic.” If bandwidth is cheap enough that your site can have as much as you want for $7/month, this seems like a non-issue. Even many of the free hosting services offer unlimited traffic.
Animated smilies are 1-2Kb, the others are less than 100 bytes. Don’t confuse community bandwidth issues with simple processing loads that are local to your personal connection & machine. The rolleyes concerto is a good example of this. It’s chock-full o’ smilies and a fair number of them are animated. Loading that page gives the user the impression that TSDMB network is grinding to a halt, when in fact it’s a personal problem (your Inet connection speed & available processing power & memory). I have [what is considered these days] a bare-minimum machine: P133 & 32Megs RAM and it still only takes about 5 seconds to load & display properly.
Granted you did say it was more of an issue with non-local file requests, and I thanks you for that. However, I have been here about a year and I look at a fair number of threads here and I can’t ever recall seeing more than a handful of posts that call for files on 3rd party servers. I imagine that photos would be the most offending (in more than one way!) examples, but simple jpegs, gifs or bmps are usually less than 50Kb and therefore shouldn’t take more than 2-5 seconds to load with even the slowest connection.
I would never post huge files or animation in legit threads, that would just kill the thread and I would expect & hope that the moderators would yank the offending post.
I also think that problem is somewhat self correcting. If I find that a particular thread is slow to load (everybody knows there’s a stop button on your browser toolbar, right?), I am not likely to wait past 5-10 seconds or so for it to finish loading (more than that and it’s got to be 10+ pages long) and it’s doubtful that I’ll go back to that thread knowing I’ll have to experience such a wait.
While I agree with Puff that it may be a non-issue thus far, it is something to keep in mind as more & more of us get into graphics.
And don’t forget, unless I’m mistaken, that all graphics loaded onto the SDMB become the nonexclusive property of the Chicago Reader, as do all of our posts.
“Are you now or have you ever been a member of a communist dishwashing organization?”
Frank Burns, MAS*H
All of my pictures come from my personal web space, and I have no problem sharing. And since I’m on AOhell, I want you to slow their servers down as much as you can. (you know, just to piss em off some more)
“People must think it must be fun to be a super genuis,
But they don’t realize how hard it is
to put up with all the idiots in the world.”
– Calvin and Hobbes
(__) /
Well it looks like everybody is being good and taking responsibility for their own actions. Thus far nobody has come forth to say “you know, you’re right. I did that and I was wrong”.
I think it’s time to shift the burden of proof- let’s have an example of an offending post (where large files were referenced on 3rd party sites). I think we’re all being needlessly defensive. As several have said in this & other related threads, it’s a non-issue.
Don Ho can sign autographs 3.4 times faster than Efrem Zimbalist Jr.
Not true. In the thread in About This Message Board on this topic, I admitted that I didn’t understand the whole concept of “stealing bandwidth” before it was brought up there, and thus I had let Middle Son post the smiley-shooting-smiley graphic manny times over on a test thread there. Upon being advised of the problem I apologized and asked TubaDiva to delete that post if she thought it was a problem.
So, do you want me to beat my breast over this or what?
I’m not sure what breast beating is, but it sounds painful. The conclusion I was attempting to draw was that a single offense warrants a single response, if the image really was a bandwidth hog or a copyright violation, it should have been dealt with in the thread in which it occurs.
I don’t think a single semi-questionable instance merrits a net being cast over all “Smilie Masters, Smilie Hunters, Hypertext Masters and all other Graphic-Happy Dopers”. The current administration seems to be on their toes with regard to the matter.
Don Ho can sign autographs 3.4 times faster than Efrem Zimbalist Jr.