Duke Tower Kitchener | 39 fl | completed

[ac3r]

I wonder what and where the admin pays for hosting. My website is on a $11.00 a month hosting service and has unlimited bandwidth/storage space/SQL etc. It's not a dedicated server, but I doubt WRC has enough traffic to justify running on Xeon's either.

[tomh009]

The bigger thing is the attachment storage still isnt unlimited. I used up 50mb quickly. 200 would last me a little longer but not long enough to justify paying for it.

It all depends on the size that you want to post. I resize mine down to 1200px which is (in my view) a decent size for most screens and yet loads quickly, including on mobile devices (my last DTK post, at 1200x1900, is about 350 KB). At that size 200 MB is enough for 500-600 photos. The elite members have no limit, I think. @dtkvictim, are these too small in your opinion?

One reason I wish everyone were able to use the attachments is because at some point users will no longer be active here, and will let their imgur/whatever accounts lapse. And then we have no images, just broken links, losing our historical documentation.

[Acitta]

I am well aware of the premium member option. Unfortunately as an 18 year old university student living away from home in the middle of a pandemic, there is no way I can justify spending such money. 

As for the low res photos, for myself I know I downsized them so I could upload more before I hit my quota lol. I imagine at least some others may have done the same.

How much is it ?

Premium Membership

[taylortbb]

One reason I wish everyone were able to use the attachments is because at some point users will no longer be active here, and will let their imgur/whatever accounts lapse. And then we have no images, just broken links, losing our historical documentation.

I agree. As a premium member, the only thing I really want my membership to include is no ads. I'd prefer everyone had unlimited attachment storage, as it's much better than having links that inevitably go dead.

As for photo downscaling, even with unlimited storage there's a per-attachment limit. My phone (Pixel 5) by default has images that are over the maximum attachment size.

[dtkvictim]

I wonder what and where the admin pays for hosting. My website is on a $11.00 a month hosting service and has unlimited bandwidth/storage space/SQL etc. It's not a dedicated server, but I doubt WRC has enough traffic to justify running on Xeon's either.

The small hosts that advertise these all around unlimited options will never actually let a customer take full advantage of that. They might play the numbers game and assume that 99% of customers will be thoroughly profitable, and let 1% go slightly beyond what is profitable. But anyone trying to take true advantage of the unlimited options will find themselves throttled to the point of unusability, or in violation of some policy that gets their account terminated. Even companies like Google and Amazon learned the hard way that they can't support any unlimited storage options, although they draw much more attention from those looking to abuse the policies.

It all depends on the size that you want to post. I resize mine down to 1200px which is (in my view) a decent size for most screens and yet loads quickly, including on mobile devices (my last DTK post, at 1200x1900, is about 350 KB). At that size 200 MB is enough for 500-600 photos. The elite members have no limit, I think. @dtkvictim, are these too small in your opinion?

I suppose it all depends on the specific photo. To be clear, I'm grateful for people posting whatever they choose to post, so don't worry about changing your habits just because I'm whining. I never know what sort of details people might be interested in zooming in on, so I just leave them in the original resolution, especially since it's less effort than down-scaling would be.

One reason I wish everyone were able to use the attachments is because at some point users will no longer be active here, and will let their imgur/whatever accounts lapse. And then we have no images, just broken links, losing our historical documentation.

This is fair, and I certainly wouldn't argue against that given the history of previous image hosting websites. That said, I've been a member of many small forums of this size, any very few seem to even make it past the 10 year mark, whereas Imgur is a borderline profitable (or maybe even profitable, hard to tell from Googling) company. So I figured the odds of it outlasting this website are decent enough that I would take the chance, but I could easily be wrong and look like an idiot.

I can't find it now, but I recall in one of the first reddit posts from the Imgur creator he said the strategy of old hosts putting those "This image is using too much bandwidth, and the uploader hasn't paid for a premium subscription" watermarks over the image just reflects poorly on the host, and not the image uploader who wouldn't care at all. Thus they have no interest in that approach. Accounts aren't required to upload there either, so there isn't any issue of accounts "lapsing".

[tomh009]

As for photo downscaling, even with unlimited storage there's a per-attachment limit. My phone (Pixel 5) by default has images that are over the maximum attachment size.

I do think this is A Good Thing. If we have a page with a dozen photos directly off the camera that's easily 20 MB of images, and it will load quite slowly on many people's devices. I downsize my photos either on the phone (lots of apps for that) or on the PC, it really doesn't take much time.

[tomh009]

One reason I wish everyone were able to use the attachments is because at some point users will no longer be active here, and will let their imgur/whatever accounts lapse. And then we have no images, just broken links, losing our historical documentation.

This is fair, and I certainly wouldn't argue against that given the history of previous image hosting websites. That said, I've been a member of many small forums of this size, any very few seem to even make it past the 10 year mark, whereas Imgur is a borderline profitable (or maybe even profitable, hard to tell from Googling) company. So I figured the odds of it outlasting this website are decent enough that I would take the chance, but I could easily be wrong and look like an idiot.

I can't find it now, but I recall in one of the first reddit posts from the Imgur creator he said the strategy of old hosts putting those "This image is using too much bandwidth, and the uploader hasn't paid for a premium subscription" watermarks over the image just reflects poorly on the host, and not the image uploader who wouldn't care at all. Thus they have no interest in that approach. Accounts aren't required to upload there either, so there isn't any issue of accounts "lapsing".

I don't know the imgur people or policies, but if you look at the older posts on the site, you'll see many that are heavily watermarked by photobucket. Imgur may not be doing that today, but as a corporation they can change their policies in the future, and it could leave us stranded, whereas uploaded attachments will always remain available. Hence my preference.

That said, the forum supports both and each person can choose the method he or she prefers.

[taylortbb]

As for photo downscaling, even with unlimited storage there's a per-attachment limit. My phone (Pixel 5) by default has images that are over the maximum attachment size.

I do think this is A Good Thing. If we have a page with a dozen photos directly off the camera that's easily 20 MB of images, and it will load quite slowly on many people's devices. I downsize my photos either on the phone (lots of apps for that) or on the PC, it really doesn't take much time.

I agree that would be bad, but automatic thumbnailing with click-for-full-res is a well solved problem. Unfortunately I think the general death of forums like this, in favour of large sites like Reddit, means that forum software isn't well developed anymore. Being written in PHP I'm sure doesn't help the situation. If MyBB was a more modern open source project I'd add the features myself and create a pull request.

[Spokes]

I wonder what and where the admin pays for hosting. My website is on a $11.00 a month hosting service and has unlimited bandwidth/storage space/SQL etc. It's not a dedicated server, but I doubt WRC has enough traffic to justify running on Xeon's either.

Not to derail the thread but what are xeons?  Did my lack of knowledge just show?

[Spokes]

The bigger thing is the attachment storage still isnt unlimited. I used up 50mb quickly. 200 would last me a little longer but not long enough to justify paying for it.

It all depends on the size that you want to post. I resize mine down to 1200px which is (in my view) a decent size for most screens and yet loads quickly, including on mobile devices (my last DTK post, at 1200x1900, is about 350 KB). At that size 200 MB is enough for 500-600 photos. The elite members have no limit, I think. @dtkvictim, are these too small in your opinion?

One reason I wish everyone were able to use the attachments is because at some point users will no longer be active here, and will let their imgur/whatever accounts lapse. And then we have no images, just broken links, losing our historical documentation.

That was always an issue with Wonderful Waterloo. There were a ton of broken image links that we could do nothing about

[jwilliamson]

I wonder what and where the admin pays for hosting. My website is on a $11.00 a month hosting service and has unlimited bandwidth/storage space/SQL etc. It's not a dedicated server, but I doubt WRC has enough traffic to justify running on Xeon's either.

Not to derail the thread but what are xeons?  Did my lack of knowledge just show?

 Xeon is Intel's server CPU line. They are typically more expensive than consumer CPUs but come with extra features for those willing to pay.

[plam]

I agree that would be bad, but automatic thumbnailing with click-for-full-res is a well solved problem. Unfortunately I think the general death of forums like this, in favour of large sites like Reddit, means that forum software isn't well developed anymore. Being written in PHP I'm sure doesn't help the situation. If MyBB was a more modern open source project I'd add the features myself and create a pull request.

The GitHub repo does seem to be getting recent commits, but I'm not sure how often they take pull requests.

[ac3r]

I wonder what and where the admin pays for hosting. My website is on a $11.00 a month hosting service and has unlimited bandwidth/storage space/SQL etc. It's not a dedicated server, but I doubt WRC has enough traffic to justify running on Xeon's either.

Not to derail the thread but what are xeons?  Did my lack of knowledge just show?

They're a line of Intel CPUs generally used on dedicated server hardware (shared servers can use them too, but with dedicated you get full access to the server hardware as opposed to sharing it with other customers). A dedicated server with such dedicated power is really only needed if you're serving a massive amount of web traffic.

I was just curious since I don't think WRC is so popular you'd be needing that much raw power or bandwidth, so a shared server could be sufficient and not cost more than $150 per year. I did a whois lookup and it looks like Hostinger shared servers limit customers to 10, 20 or 100GB of SSD space which is unfortunately not a lot, but there are definitely other hosting companies that provide "unlimited" space (in quotes because as others said, they can throttle if you were filling up terabytes worth of their storage space) for pretty cheap without drastically slowing down the website.

But this has become very off topic haha...

[Spokes]

Any photo updates? Haha

[Jefferson]

What's the floor count at?