Sudden jump in bandwidth is costing DD money!

[Lee Enfield-Burke]

Over the last month, the website's bandwidth usage has almost doubled, driving DD's costs up considerably. Here are ways we can help solve this problem.

(a) Write messages that have content in them. No one-liners! Sure, it's exciting to have a high post count, but if you're posting "empty" or near-empty messages just to get "big numbers", we will downsize your numbers for you without warning.

(b) Cut down on e-mail notifications of other members' postings. If you need these, opt for the "digest" version of the notification rather than a separate one for every message.

(c) From now on, if you want to use an avatar with your postings, you'll need to email it to me so that I can host it here at our own site rather than expending extra bandwidth to fetch it from somewhere else.

(d) No signatures longer than six lines. This will help cut back significantly on wasted bandwidth. (The normal "netiquette" limit for sigs is three lines, but we're cutting you a little slack.)

One of the things the YW universe is about is not wasting energy: let's all put it into practice here, okay?

Lee / Forum Administrator

[Agent M]

Okay. Sorry Lee!!! Sorry DD!!!!

*Agent~M*

"Thank you Jack" "Your welcome" "No not you, we named the monkey Jack" -Pirates of the Caribbean
"To youth and freedom!" A popular pirates toast.

[mjwilco]

Wouldn't having avatars hosted on someone else's site be better than having them on this one?

[Sam]

Probably not. Because if you look at it this way there is more energy taken up if it has to be sent here over and over and over (you get the point) every time you post or even log on. So that energy costs the site money. And if this site is making it use energy then DD is paying for it. I think that is right, but if not mabey I should have left it to Lee.

~Sam (Hifun55) and Dog~
Hyperness and goffyness are fun; but you must get serious to get a job done. -a short poem with a bit of advice from me

[Lee Enfield-Burke]

Originally posted by mjwilco:
Wouldn't having avatars hosted on someone else's site be better than having them on this one?

"Better" perhaps in terms of our not having to pay for it...but wildly unethical, in that stealing bandwidth and making some other site pay for it is BAD. DD would pitch a fit at the suggestion.

It's good in that we can locally control the size (in both dimensions and K) of avatars, which sometimes get rather out of hand.

Lee / Forum Administrator

[Lee Enfield-Burke]

And a question from elsewhere which bears on this:

*sigh* Wouldn't it be so much easier if DD just paid a set monthly fee or something like that, and then we could just go crazy?

DD does pay a set monthly fee for an amount of bandwidth which, frankly, should be enough -- it's enough to support similar other UBB.x forums with a few thousand members rather than just under 700. But once usage (in the form of too many pageviews and so on) pushes the bandwidth above that amount, DD winds up paying "overage" penalties which can be up to double the usual amount. The only remedy for the problem as it stands would be to change "usage plans," which would give the forums more bandwidth, but also quadruple DD's basic monthly costs. She's doing okay, guys, but she's not a millionairess.

These forums are mostly here so that people can have a place to talk about the books. The stuff that takes place in "Chatter" is fun, but it takes second place to what goes on in the other forums, at least as far as DD's concerned.

And yes, all "Chatter" topics now will have a "half-life" of about a month unless more than 10% of the forum membership are routinely reading them (which the Forum stats will tell me). Once we get the number of messages down to about 5000, it's going to stay there: you put in a hundred new messages, a hundred older ones fall out. So make the new messages quality ones...

Lee / Forum Administrator