Out of interest, do you know how much bandwidth we use on a monthly basis, and what's the allowance on the hosting? I'm just wondering really?
And slightly related, is it possible to setup something so that we can host images on TekForums, but with the anti leeching stuff like some sites have, rather than largely relying on personal storage? I'm mostly thinking in terms of guide here really where after a while some guides lose their images when peoples accounts close or external hosting providers decide to change their policy or close down?
Just a thought really?
Also Baidu spiders are constantly crawling the site in many numbers, they obviously seem to like it here, but they must be using a lot of bandwidth!
And if we have that many on our site how many must there be crawling all of the internets websites! Unless it has a particular affinity to our content :)
Google in contrast visits our site occasionally, but google searches always seem to be up to date, it doesn't seem to be very efficient to have so many Baidu spiders..
Edit: And we have 12 guests on at the moment as well!
Edit 2: December and January each also saw pretty much 4x or more page hits than pretty much any other month!
Edit 3: Ok so Baidu is Chinese, the Chinese are well known for counterfeit versions of stuff, maybe there is a Chinese replica of TekForums on the interweb! :D
A lot to think about here but i like the image hosting idea as long as people learn to use a program to resize the image before its uploaded, maybe a file size limit and also height and width limits.
If you're going to that trouble may as well just use imgur. Just get nexus to create a plugin for the forums or something?
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Quote from: M3ta7h3ad on February 10, 2012, 03:27:27 AM
If you're going to that trouble may as well just use imgur. Just get nexus to create a plugin for the forums or something?
Well we could...
... Thanks for offering to pay neXus in the creation of a custom bespoke plug in for the forums mate, I'm sure everyone will thank you for it ;) :P
:rofl:
Maybe worth checking if there is an existing SMF add-on, and I think the leeching protection is just server policy, but could be wrong :)
And sorry for my long babbling post :D
In terms of hosting/bandwidth I'm on a professional unlimited package, so thats a non-issue :)
I'll look into the options for image hosting tomorrow and see what is available on the SMF site.
Also just another thought, might want to consider google analytics just to see where we are getting visitors from, some of the guides have drawn a lot of traffic..
And in terms of image leeching, this might be a good idea to drive some more traffic where the image is leeched:
http://mikeperry.org/tech_tips/disabling_facebook.html (http://mikeperry.org/tech_tips/disabling_facebook.html) << Ignore the FB reference in the link
It seems there is quite a few options available judging by whats in the modifications section of the SMF site. Weighing up the pros and cons of third party hosting vs uploading directly to the server, I'm thinking third party is still the better option as it will prevent having to take what will eventually become massive site backups (thinking just of the photos in the photography forum) and it will also keep the onus on the user to maintain their images and upload responsibly.
I'm happy to hear more ideas on this though and recommendations on services. I've always used imageshack but they are now officially toilet in my eyes after the recent changes they've made and I don't really know how reliable other services will be...
Yeah see your point, hadn't thought about the backup space..
is there no option to backup everything but the photos etc.. ?
they could be backed up less often.... and even with photos a few meg each it's going to take a long time before there's gigs and gigs to backup ?
(which should be pretty fast from the server anyway?)
I guess, but nonetheless it would be easier to just have them maintained elsewhere rather than have to concern with potentially GBs of images on top of an already growing files and database backup.
I'm not ruling it out, just trying to work out what is the most practical/best solution.
maybe store them on another server ?
I'd be happy to back it up now and again.... and I'm sure a few other people here would too..... it's all publicly available photos so no problem there ?
it's going to suck if the photos in all the guides etc.. start to disappear :(
All for another solution since what I though was the perfect solution, Dropbox, killed my public sharing for bandwidth breaches.
Well this is the problem third-party services are the most convenient but can be recalled at any time, so perhaps serverside is the way to go. It's just a case of finding the right mod to suit as there's user galleries, individual uploaders, ones that use third parties. I'm thinking just a simple upload one might be best but then the galleries would be good for Photography. There's also one that interfaces with Coppermine but I've never used that, so can anyone shed some light on it? I think matt5cott has used it before on his sites but thats about all I know.