Yes it does have an effect, since everything on the screen is going to get downloaded to your computer, text and images. BUT once an image has been loaded once to your computer before, it should remain in your Internet browser's cache until the cache is emptied by you manually or when the browser is set to clear its cache automatically. Could be based on a certain schedule or never based on settings, I'm not that familiar with this subject.

Although one important matter does come to mind of browser caches. I think many people here use anonymous browsing modes in Firefox or Google Chrome, and a feature of anonymous browsing is that no browsing history, including images being cached to your computer is taking place. So people who are browsing with anonymous mode are always downloading the same avatars and images again.

And speaking of avatars, I downloaded a few on this page since you were asking about them to see how big they are, and most were around 20 Kb but your animated gif is 1.92 Megabytes Not blaming you as you probably had no idea it is that big, but rather the forum software should have a reasonable size restriction setting on uploaded avatar size to prevent this from accidentally happening.

>>>ROBERT DE NIRO impersonation ON>>>

"Are you talking to me?"

>>>ROBERT DE NIRO impersonation OFF>>>

I think mine (just an image) is about 25 Kb, as far as I can tell.

So how improbable/difficult would it be to change the way the forum deals with images? What about images attached as thumbnails that open in another window/tab - this seems to be very common in other forums and would give the bro's with downloading issues easier access to each page and the ability to pick and choose the images they want to download in their full glory.

I have very little knowledge about IT so this might be too much work? Just an idea, anyway...

EDIT: Just another thought - seeing the amount of "fun" the mods have with noobies (and probably the rest of us as well! ) as it is, I agree with your last point about forum software whole-heartedly - if at all possible all this stuff should be handled automatically! Either by restricting files that are too big or automatically resizing them. Otherwise it just becomes another thing to try to control/police.

[ Last edited by  lister01 at 20-8-2010 23:26 ]

By thumbnails you probably mean images that have been uploaded to an external site like a free image hosting site (like Imageshack.us), and a link, hotlink, or thumbnail placed here. Since these images are hosted from another server, they do not eat up the resources of 141, but the bro's downloading that image are still downloading the same amount of kilobytes. Of course, if the image is hosted on a server closer to the bro, the download will be faster. So a free image hosted in U.S. could be slower to download than an image in an Asian server.

Currently the 141 site is set up so that each attachment is downloaded in full when a user loads the page. No thumbnails offered.

Since I agree with you main case, I wrote a small guide on why users should resize their photos: http://forum.sex141.com/eforum/viewthread.php?tid=23008

I'll still be so selfish as to say that in general I like to see the highest quality photos in this forum like what Goose posts, as I want to save the most detailed memories of any girl I have visited. But not resizing photos before uploading will infringe on the overall quality of the uploaded image, which is bad. I'd say it looks like photos resized to somewhere around 1000 pixels wide of height should make them quite generally great quality. As you point out, there is no sense in uploading 2000-3000 pixel size photos.

You neglected to mention the other problem with using an external site. You have to deal with a ton of crappy ads, which are often way bigger than the image you are interested in viewing.

I think you should look at the Chinese side of this forum - which I'd think shares the same platform/bandwidth etc as our side? Anyway, over there its a real mess with guys posting up all sort of avatars and bottom of post picture/video captions.  On top of that, there are all sorts of ads all over the page.

Anyway, the point I THINK I'm making is that comparatively, our side is way much cleaner AND I would think, take up very much smaller bandwidth etc and thus perhaps we may be making too much of this problem with large Kb avatars.

Does what I say make any sense???  As little as I know about computers!! Ouch!

SEAJ

Yeah, with a broadband connection it really does not matter how much crap the page has to load. Compare that to streaming videos or downloading torrents. Would only matter in case you have a bad connection or VPN, which will always be a minority.

Thanks - could you go to Pickypricks's Selena thread:

http://forum.sex141.com/eforum/v ... mp;extra=#pid274634"s

He's tried a few things with picture downloading with mysterious results that you perhaps are very well qualified to look into.  This is getting more and more interesting and I'm learning lots!

Thanks y'all

SEAJ
sp. edits

[ Last edited by  SEAJ at 22-8-2010 21:26 ]

I think the inability of some members to re-size their photos is a problem on all boards such as this.

I use Photoshop to reduce the number of pixels to 800 horizontally or 600 vertically. That creates an ideal size for viewing.

Alan