Hissing_Sid Posted March 15, 2005 Report Share Posted March 15, 2005 (edited) I just found I had a problem with my computer. It suddenly decided it'd only let me save pictures as BMPs. A quick nose around the MS help website revealed that this happens when your browser cache is "full". So, I had a look in my browser cache and deleted everything in there. This fixed the problem. Worth remembering if you ever get this problem. So, what's this got to do with Arnies Airsoft? Well, I was surprised and confused to find that quite a few of the 80x80 icons I can see on peoples posts are actually rather large pictures. The one that I recall, particularly, was Whitefeathers picture of a yank soldier with a fag in his mouth. That pic appears to actually be about 600x600 pixels. I have no real idea how internet forums transfer data but it seems to me that if everybody is using large pictures in their CIs and sigs and then telling the forum software to rescale them then it could slow the forums down significantly. I notice that there are a lot of people with animated CIs and sigs at the moment. Is it just a coincidence that the page is now dog-slow to load? Don't forget that some of us are still forced to remain on dial-up. I pay £16 a month for the privelidge of having 150 hours of *albatross*-draggingly slow net connection. It sucks when that gets eaten up waiting for forum pages to load which are filled with sigs of Mr Bean movies and other junk. Edited March 15, 2005 by Hissing Sid Quote Link to post Share on other sites
McMadkat Posted March 15, 2005 Report Share Posted March 15, 2005 Yeah it is annoying when people post large pictures (*kicks self in nuts*) I am rather bad at forgetting that not everyone is paying £17 a month for unlimited broadband...but I have to agree, if people made their avatars and sigs a bit smaller the pages would be better all round. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Tripod Posted March 16, 2005 Report Share Posted March 16, 2005 Try increasing your cache size. Then, you dont have to worry about it filling up and you won't have to worry about load times. The animated signatures and avatars are in .gif formats. They are not that big, largest I've seen was 300ish KB. Should only take a few seconds for even a 56K user to load. Heh my basic cable plan gives me 4.7MBS. Not bad. Using my DSL feels like 56k! Quote Link to post Share on other sites
cruxed Posted March 20, 2005 Report Share Posted March 20, 2005 Doesnt the server resize it when you upload it it for you avatar/sig? Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Arnie Posted March 20, 2005 Report Share Posted March 20, 2005 It does, but I think off-site avatars are currently allowed, and those can't be resized. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
gazchap Posted March 20, 2005 Report Share Posted March 20, 2005 You should be able to modify the board so that it checks the size of off-site avatars (the getimagesize() function in PHP) as long as allow_url_fopen is turned on. That'll fix it Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Arnie Posted March 20, 2005 Report Share Posted March 20, 2005 Correct, however that would be somewhat overly intensive checking offsite links every time. Everytime that the avatar was checked the image would have to be loaded server side, then checked for size. It's a lot easier to disallow the use of remote URLs for avatars.. which is what I've just done. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
gazchap Posted March 20, 2005 Report Share Posted March 20, 2005 Certainly the easiest method What I meant though was to check the size of the avatar when a user attempted to change it. Flash up a box saying "OI, resize your avatar you bandwidth-killing webmonkey!" or something Of course there would still be ways around it, but at least most people would pay attention to it Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Arnie Posted March 20, 2005 Report Share Posted March 20, 2005 Yeah that should sort the problem from now on I'm on a fast connection most the time so never really notice avatar sizes myself. It's handy when folks let me know about such issues. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Hissing_Sid Posted March 21, 2005 Author Report Share Posted March 21, 2005 Thanks for the concern. Seriously, on a 56k dial-up I see the page load and then I have to wait about 30 seconds for all the various frames of peoples animated sig's to load. In a recent thread, I forget the one, there were a few people who had sigs such as the Mr Bean one and it took about 10 minutes to load! It's all very well saying that a sig is "only" 300k but a dial-up has an average data transfer rate of about 4k/sec so loading a bunch of 50k or larger dross isn't a fun thing to do. Oh, and before anybody suggests I get cable, I live in a rather remote area with no cable. I helped organise a local campaign to get cable installed and we passed our trigger level before xmas. Hopefully cable will be coming soon, at which point I'll be in there like a rat up a drainpipe. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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