Administrative Request from your buddy Pamelamama!

[pamelamama]

Hello [username:46b215f5ee], you are one of my favorite forum members! :mwah Can you help me with this situation? ;) (It's the username function, I'm not pickin' on ya, silly)

In an effort to preserve bandwidth, I would like to avoid using [img] tags in signatures. I really love seeing everyone's pictures in thier posts, of completed work, etc. So I'd like to continue to host those. But photos in the sigs just take up a lot of bandwidth. Can we keep the links, zap the pix, if you dont mind. :D

Some of our mods have been going into old posts and changing the imgs to links, so the stuff is still accessible, but it's a lighter load for our server. I L :love V E our MODS!!

Doing my best to think of ways to keep our bandwidth usage manageable. :hmm We can avoid using Mr. Dancing Banana smiley except on Very Special Occasions. He's huge but so cute, so I've left him up!

I don't want to be a spoilsport, but I do want to keep our expenses manageable!

If you have any other ideas for cutting down on bandwidth usage, feel free to advise!

:mwah :grouphug

Pamelamama, admitted smiley addict :love

[averymybaby]

poor mr. banana... :LOL but your request sounds perfectly reasonable to me!

[pb_and_j]

I always thought Mr Banana was creepy anyway ;)

[marnie]

makes perfect sense!

[CraftyMommaOf2]

Excellent idea! Are there any other smilies we need to use sparingly?

[littleturtlemama]

yes, i'm the slow one, lol, but do you mean using the img thingy at all, like we should do links for all pics, or just siggy pics?

[pamelamama]

Just siggy pix :)

Still use them to show your stuff in posts!

[mommomrebecca]

O.K. Will someone tell me if this applies to my sig. and if so, what specifically I need to do? Sorry...don't know what the heck you're talking about. :faint

[radish]

NP!!

[pamelamama]

O.K. Will someone tell me if this applies to my sig. and if so, what specifically I need to do? Sorry...don't know what the heck you're talking about. :faint

Yes, Rebecca, this means you! WOuld you like me to fix it. ??

[mommomrebecca]

O.K. Will someone tell me if this applies to my sig. and if so, what specifically I need to do? Sorry...don't know what the heck you're talking about. :faint

Yes, Rebecca, this means you! WOuld you like me to fix it. ??

If you don't mind, Ms. Host, I would appreciate that. My Uncle Mark is always rambling on about bandwidth (we have a family forum) and I just tune it out...

[pamelamama]

what font is that in your 'where's waldorf'?

[pamelamama]

All right, I took out the little picture you were linking to, and made it into text. I made the colors to sort of look like you had them, but you can go into your sig and change them to however you like them to look!! :D

[mommomrebecca]

??? But the one you changed it to is fine! Do you have to erase the pics in my sig?

[Meredith]

So let me ask you this: can we have url links in our siggies? Are you talking about just plain, outright pics in our sigs? you aren't talking about " Check out the pants I just finished! (http://www.photobucket.com/meredithsreallycoolpants)" ? correct?

ETA: don't click on it ... it will get you nowhere.

[pamelamama]

URL Links in siggs: GREAT And desirable

Actual live photos in our sigs: Bandwidth demons

Got me?

[danzarooni]

I totally understand :)

[TotalRealm]

Hi pamelamamma!

Ok I have been testing all day and nothing is slow for me...........I don't know if you saw my posts yet or not but it's under site suggestions...........anyway, you and the moderators might want to come up with some sort of archive scheme and start archiving old posts. I don't know if this will help or not but it's worth a try.

I think alot of the slowness is felt by people who are using MACs and possibly ( I don't know for sure) older versions of Explorer (WIN or MAC) and this might be topped of by phpbb having to "fetch" a post among many posts...........your site is so BIG and Wooly. So like I say, you might start thinking about archiving older posts. That would make it a little less hard on the PHP/mysql subsystem to fetch things.

Will this solve your problem? I don't know but I would try that first.........if that doesn't work I would try minimizing on the eye candy (even though it's pretty and fun to look at/play with) those could be the culprit causing it to be slow for certain people.


I'll be watching for your replies here because you are popping on and off MSN like a wildwoman!

Bret

[pamelamama]

Ok, archiving the posts... we can try that.

I have no idea how to do that. Off to learn.

[jmo]

We could always upgrade to the latest and greatest version of phpBBFM, Pam...

Off to see if it's worth it...

ETA: in the hopes that the changes involve database and code optimization

[hunnybumm]

Ok, so 2 months later I take the banana guy out of my sig. SO SORRY! But I didn't see this earlier. :)

[pamelamama]

:hug