Problems coming our way

[letvor]

I have bad news and good news.

I'm not a technical guru, but nevertheless, I'll try to help by writing my opinion.

Definition of the problem:

I can agree that there are some topics where "posting" means adding 3 pictures and clicking submit (multiply with XY posts a day). If you allow 5 pictures... Well... I do not know how "heavy" is this post for example but thinking as a layman picture takes more memory than pure text. Right?

Solution:

Limit picture posting, not to 1 per post, someone can add 30 posts a day. I do not know is feasible but: limit the number of pictures that can be added from one account to (I don't know) 6 a week or 15 a month.
I say this because we are family here, but generally speaking (If you listen to Slipknot you know what I'm talking about) people = shit. There will always be someone who will go against the rules.

I'm STRONGLY against this:
About not keeping everything for an indefinite period of time. I rarely if ever go back and search for something from months ago, and I think a 3 month limit is reasonable.

When I'm talking about this, I have in mind "my" topic GIMP's that didn't survive which is encyclopedic type and if you remove all posts older than XY months - there is no point to post there anymore. Also, many good stories will be lost too.

The idea to users who post tons of pictures:

You can make a collage from your pictures (find an example in some of my posts on the topic GIMP's that didn't survive). This will consume some of your time but in this way, you can save a lot of space.

The question to the moderator:

What if we use only [.img][/img]? All pictures can be hosted somewhere else and just posted as this tag. So they will not be taking space on the server. Am I right? If this is feasible you can remove the attachment option.

I do not know what is your policy about this, so I'll just ask:
I know that all of this costs, so if things go really rough I would love to help. And I'm probably not the only one ready to do that. I live in a third-world country so I can't give much but I'm here.

This place mustn't die!

[Edukator]

This will be a recurrent issue, I'm afraid... neither limiting the number of posts/ attachment size (or both) nor increasing your current (physical ?) memory space threefold will solve it, only delay the problem for a while, sooner or later it will reappear.
None of the other proposed solutions above (auto-deleting of posts after some time, etc...) seem really satisfactory to me and looks more like poor compromises.

I'm no website hosting expert but I'm a member of various (no sex-related) specialized forums and none of these seems to have similar issues (or limitations) , one of these (non-commercial) forums have 40,000+ registered members and nearly 3 millions posts, and they never reached a saturation point: all attached pictures (forum hosted, no external hosts links) are still there, some over 10 years old ! Then there must be some solution...

I don't have a ready made solution to offer but Ralphus advice above is worth considering:

What exactly does the contract with the hosting company say in regards to unlimited storage? Does it actually say "unlimited"? If so, I'd be all over their ass about this situation. Unlimited means unlimited. We shouldn't be running out of space this quickly; we've only been with this new server a few months.

From now on I'll refrain posting anything (but text) or starting new threads till this issue is solved hoping that this limitation could be lifted soon, since this forum has mainly pictorial contents.

Whatever the outcome will be, thank you for your great work and all your efforts keeping this forum alive.

[moss]

I see people coming up with ideas of discarding anything over 3 months old. Speaking for myself, the only place I post my pictures is here. This may be true for other artists. Thus if you limit artists in that way, new members would not be able to look back over the work. When I first joined I went back a long way!
Sometimes pictures are posted and re-posted or re-appear in a reply further down a thread. Is that necessary?
Obviously there is a problem to solve which I do not know the answer to. As the only avenue I feel comfortable with, I do hope the site issue can be rectified.
But whatever will be, will be. The solution is up to the administrators. I wish them well and hope it is not too big a problem.

[La Reine Margot]

The situation is not as simple as running out of disk space.

The previous forum crashed after passing the 300mb limit for the forum itself. The other parts of the domains, two of them, all the html pages were working fine.

Apps work differently from a simple html set up. WordPress, phpBB and others make demands from the server and they need constant attention with upgrades, updates, up whatever.

My tech people did something, I don't know what exactly, but something to do with plug-ins and things like that and all of a sudden we went from being up to 98% of our capacity down to a more reasonable 66%. It got better.

The unlimited deal hosting services offer refers to the number of domains one can have. We can have a million of them; however, each one will have its own needs and for that you need CPU capacity. That's what I understand we're working on, increasing the CPU so we can run things better.

I'll maintain the 3 pix per post limit for now and the size as it is. We don't need to eliminate posts.

We'll be monitoring the situation to make sure we don't encounter problems. We will be upgrading the plan to have more to work with and for a very long time.

But we should be reasonable as far as how we use the site.

I'll have more updates soon.

[yyy02]

I'll play devil's advocate here. You do realize by limiting things, you are effectively strangling the Forum, right? I mean, certain limits are fine, but if we're back to postage stamp sized images...that's just silly.

I like the idea of eliminating threads that are three months or older with no activity, though.

How would you guys feel about introducing a fee for members? A slight fee? (To help pay for a good hosting plan) How many would stay, I wonder?

Just some thoughts, strictly from the consumer view.

[Edukator]

I'll play devil's advocate here. You do realize by limiting things, you are effectively strangling the Forum, right? I mean, certain limits are fine, but if we're back to postage stamp sized images...that's just silly.

I like the idea of eliminating threads that are three months or older with no activity, though.

How would you guys feel about introducing a fee for members? A slight fee? (To help pay for a good hosting plan) How many would stay, I wonder?

Just some thoughts, strictly from the consumer view.

Some interesting thoughts here...

I agree with you on the first point: the forum should grow (in a well controlled manner), not shrink. Limits are needed but should be imposed by ethical/political/legal reasons, not technical issues.

But you should also remember this is a very small forum with less than 600 registered members which only about 20 (or less) are regular active posters, thus a "slight" member fee won't help much. This forum is also too small to be financed by advertising banners.
Whatever the (complex) technical reasons are, the final issue always comes down to a lack of storage space on the host servers and unlimited space is never free. I can't see any other reasons than financial for this issue but we must live with these restrictions unless the owner of the forum can find the needed ressources to finance a better hosting plan. (or a very generous donor !)

And as far as (automatically) eliminating older posts and/or inactive threads most are rather opposed to this idea, and I don't think this feature is included in the basic phpBB software, it is feasible but you'll need to customize it by creating/changing codes ,etc... definitely not a simple operation for the non-expert. Manual monitoring is very time consuming and not practical.

Without being too pessimistic I don't think this forum could survive another total crash and restart from zero, thus we should be very attentive and respectful of the imposed limits, even if unpleasant.

[letvor]

I like the idea of eliminating threads that are three months or older with no activity, though.

How would you guys feel about introducing a fee for members? A slight fee? (To help pay for a good hosting plan) How many would stay, I wonder?

I can't agree with the idea of eliminating topics - period.
It would be fine if the author add a post with: "please delete this topic", otherwise that is a no-no.

Membership is a good idea, but only if it is absolutely necessary and only if it is a slight fee as you said. But there is one problem:
"Slight fee" for someone who lives in the USA (site is hosted there) and "Slight fee" for me is not the same thing. So this is a slippery terrain.
But generally, the idea is good.

[Miss Belle]

I don't mind paying a contribution. I will try to use the IMG for images so that they are hosted elsewhere.

[Zardoz]

I have bad news and good news.

[...

I'm sorry to hear that.
I reposted a lot of my artwork because I was under the impression that this was desired to rebuild the lost threads and not leave all the work to the admins. That was my understanding. Besides, I had been asked by several users to repost them.

Deleting the posts after 3 months I would not find so good, I post only my own work, and I do not distribute them in several places.In fact, the GIMP forum is the only place I show my drawings. If they are deleted after 3 months, someone who is interested in them cannot find them anymore.

But it's OK. I understand that this is not an artist archive but a discussion forum. And of course I will abide by the rules, whatever they will be. I will now stop posting old work and only sporadically post newer work that has not been published yet.

Maybe voluntary donations like in the Cruxforum could be a solution, by seeing how many donations have been received and are still needed to keep the forum running. This would also make the question of a "reasonable" amount easier.

[La Reine Margot]

I have bad news and good news.

[...

I'm sorry to hear that.
I reposted a lot of my artwork because I was under the impression that this was desired to rebuild the lost threads and not leave all the work to the admins. That was my understanding. Besides, I had been asked by several users to repost them.

Deleting the posts after 3 months I would not find so good, I post only my own work, and I do not distribute them in several places.In fact, the GIMP forum is the only place I show my drawings. If they are deleted after 3 months, someone who is interested in them cannot find them anymore.

But it's OK. I understand that this is not an artist archive but a discussion forum. And of course I will abide by the rules, whatever they will be. I will now stop posting old work and only sporadically post newer work that has not been published yet.

Maybe voluntary donations like in the Cruxforum could be a solution, by seeing how many donations have been received and are still needed to keep the forum running. This would also make the question of a "reasonable" amount easier.

We will not delete any posts. We will hold the 3 pix per post limit, we just suggest not to overdo it in one day.

We're working on increasing the capacity of the server to a level that we can afford and we should be fine.

My recent warning came about because I was checking the cPanel and I saw that the usage was pretty high, 98%, which is bordering on the edge of the precipice.

I warned people here and I also warned my master who is the hight tech person and the sweet fella, along with good old Amy, took a look at the situation, because it is them that have to do the upgrade of the server and they are pretty busy with a lot. Amy is launching her new film TOMORROW! And Jac is going back to the set TOMORROW!, and in both cases after a looong weekend of heavy eating and drinking and feeding their frustrations... Jac, mostly, I think Amy had more fun.

So, I don't know what Jac did, he mentioned some plug-ins fixing and some clearing up the excess of something or other, none of the files of course, and then I saw that the usage went down to 66% which is manageable.

Jac will work on the upgrade of the server during this week. we first have to make sure that it won't interrupt the activities of the FORUM.

As far as contributions to the upkeep of this sacrosanct place, that would be nice, but we're not going to put the FORUM behind a pay wall or anything like that.

What we will be doing soon is to set up a support site for all the work, with plenty of goodies and at a nice affordable rate, from 3 bucks per month or so. Another way to help to keep this going is to get our movies. those pretty naughty sexy things pay the bills.

We're going to be celebrating 23 YEARS of this magnificent site and that is something to appreciate, right?

So, don't worry, we are working things out. The FORUM will not collapse again. I mean, not because of the posts, and we're keeping spammers and hackers at bay. That is my job, amongst other tasks.

Don't worry... be happy... that's a song from the good old days when Jac and I were hitching our way through the side roads of Europe, back in the summer of 1989... it was fun. Jac wrote a script about it, I wonder if he still has it somewhere.

More news later. ... moving the post