Hello, everyone, and a couple of ideas

[jtr1962]

Nice to see a bunch of familiar faces here already. Tannin/Tea/Tony Wilson invited me over to help with the beta testing. I'm using my SR handle, in case you're wondering who I am.

Anyway, I had a couple of ideas for the new forum:

1)If possible(and with Eugene and Davin's permission, of course) migrate everything that is currently on the SR forum to the Storage Forum if and when SR closes it's doors for good.

2)Limit sizes(both height and width) of images to something reasonable, say 1024 pixels, both to shorten download times for those of us still on 56K(i.e. me), and to prevent spamming. When I was preparing the old threads for Tannin, someone had spammed a few threads with 30000x1 and 1x30000 images that made the threads nearly unreadable.

3)I noticed that threads of more than 25 posts are viewable only as separate pages. If possible, allow at least 100 posts per page(option in user profile), or better yet, the entire thread. It is much easier to both save and read threads this way. This is kind of a pet peeve of mine, the trend of everything on the Internet being changed to a bunch of short pages that require loads of mouse clicks to navigate instead of longer pages that can be easily scrolled.

If I have any more ideas I'll post them. One thing I'm very happy about already with the new forums-no banner ads! This things both increase page load times while waiting for the overloaded ad server, and make my system unstable.

 

[Mercutio]

Welcome.

Banner ads are kind-of half-heartedly being tossed around, actually.

And the 25-posts to a page problem seems to have just come up in the last day or so, since there haven't been threads with 25 posts until yesterday.

 

[jtr1962]

Banner ads are kind-of half-heartedly being tossed around, actually.

 

[Tannin]

Hi JTR, good to see you with us.

On the banner ads thing, the decisions in this madhouse end up being made by the admin team (you can read about all that stuff in the FAQ thread). There are twelve of us at present. (Fourteen if you count Tea and DB.) I'm on your side on this one: I'd go through quite a bit of pain before I'd willingly endure banner ads, and Mercutio is on a particularly poor dial-up service. That gives you two "no" votes already. If you can persuade another five AT members to your point of view, that's a majority.

(PS: I trust that Tea and DB get votes too? It would seem most unfair to exclude them.)

 

[Mercutio]

Actually, I suggested the idea in the first place. I hate them, too. In fact, no one is actually in favor of the idea as such. However, it's also not fair that Handruin is bearing the burden of paying for our new watering hole, and doing most of the admin work. Income from banner ads might offset that somewhat.

What I really hope is that Handruin gets the support he needs, that our bandwidth needs don't grow too fast, and that we never, ever need banners. What I fear - and I'm a bit of a pessimist - is that 20 or 35GB/month will be but a snack to those of us with a forum-monkey on our backs.

 

[Pradeep]

I'm on your side on this one: I'd go through quite a bit of pain before I'd willingly endure banner ads, and Mercutio is on a particularly poor dial-up service. That gives you two "no" votes already. If you can persuade another five AT members to your point of view, that's a majority.

(PS: I trust that Tea and DB get votes too? It would seem most unfair to exclude them.)

I'm back on dial up after chello broadband was shutdown, so anything that eases the load on my dl limit would be welcome. DB also only has intermittent dial up in the sty that he lives in when he is not in the drunk tank. So two no votes here too.

 

[Pradeep]

Of course I would be happy to host some of the load on my webspace if things get down to that stage. Definitely no need for Handruin to go titstup.com.

 

[jtr1962]

Well, I see the 25 posts per page problem has been fixed
What is the maximum posts per page now(or is the limit gone entirely)?

Glad to see everyone so far is with me on the no banner ads thing. I don't want to see Handruin unfairly footing the bill for what essentially amounts to a playground for us, either, so I'll understand it if they are needed as a last resort after all other options have been exhausted.

 

[Handruin]

Well, I see the 25 posts per page problem has been fixed
What is the maximum posts per page now(or is the limit gone entirely)?

Glad to see everyone so far is with me on the no banner ads thing. I don't want to see Handruin unfairly footing the bill for what essentially amounts to a playground for us, either, so I'll understand it if they are needed as a last resort after all other options have been exhausted.

I've set the amount to 50 per page. I think 100 may get to be a bit much as it will eat up CPU time to generate multiple 100 page threads per person when they reach that size. Let me know how it goes with 50, and it it's still too short, I'll jump to 75-100.