How's it work

[lucky20]

Q from Lucky dog
is bandwidh suffering

A from Tulsa
monitoring used 22gbs of 60 gbs

in very very simple terms how does the site work should we be aware of the way we use the site in the interest of economy or waste educate us o mighty peers

[Sid]

well Lucky

in simple terms.

each image or piece of text that is on your screen has a size,
this size is measured in any thing from bytes to kilobytes,
these add up and make the megabytes and gigabytes.
so the more pages, visited the more use the board gets by its users the more of these bytes are transfered from the server of the site to the users PC.

these add up to make the bandwidth of the site.

things like SMILIES and Images tend to use up more bandwidth as does the petz section.

[lucky20]

I assume we are allocated 60 gigabytes per month
what happens if we use this amount before end of month

[RKnarr01]

i think thats when the site crashes and we're not able to get on.

[Sid]

What Rich said,

If the 60 gigs are reached before the end of the month. the board is Suspended by the Hosting company. until either the month changes, or the person paying for the site pays a little more for the extra bandwidth.

[birdbrain]

drop the smiles

[Tulsa]

Everything that happens causes a use of bandwidth to one degree or another. For general use, this is really not something that you should be worried about. Aware of is nice, but I'm studying this daily and I'm not going to let us get shut down. We got shut down once and that was enough.

Now as we've introduced new features into the board we've seen our bandwidth spike. Once we've had a chance to work with the new features, we can target where they may be eating up more bandwidth and reduce those features/abilities to better suit our needs.

Certainly everyone can help by not going to the petz section or the Shoutbox and sitting, refreshing the screen to see if someone has said something. This is a waste of bandwidth. Both sections will refresh on their own without the users need to intervene. Now it may not happen as quickly as you would like but we have had to limit these particular sections as they were really becoming hogs.

I'm also kicking around another idea right now on our hosting and posting of pictures. I did a mod to allow people to use imageshack but personally I hate the waits of that site. So I'm thinking of opening up the board to hosting the pics as we have plenty of drive space but showing the pics in thumbnail format. This will reduce the overall load/bandwidth and it will be much faster at loading. On the thumbnails you will be able to click on those and see the full size image. Overall on successive loading of a particular thread we will save on bandwidth because you'll generally only click on that pic once. For every new post instead of reloading that pic each and every time, you'll only be reloading the thumbnails.

So be aware of how you use the site but don't worry about it that much. Just use good old common sense and we'll all be fine.

[Lazarus]

I like the idea for the pictures! I do not need to see all the pictures full size all the time and I do not have the fastest connection. Going to a thread that has a lot of Pict's in it really slows the loading for me. Please keep the smilies! They are one of the things that can make reading posts fun and help to convey what someone is trying to say.

[Tulsa]

The smilies in the posts aren't going anywhere. I killed them out of the shoutbox as a test to see how much of a difference that was causing and for the shoutbox needs, they really aren't that necessary.

The forum isn't auto-refreshing like the shoutbox so the smilies aren't an issue here.

[Tony Junior]

Question for Tulsa...
I use an image hosting site, foti.com
By linking to the pictures, are the pictures themselves taking up bandwidth of the picture, or just the BB code?

Second question...
Did that make sense?