Re: Changes to the site - forced changes

Posted by chillyplasma on 2007/12/12 1:10:06
Hmmm, I was wondering when this would happen again since I started having trouble accessing the site a few weeks ago. Making the site popular with a heavy emphasis on images will always require masses of bandwidth.

At my old company we used to have marketing staff come in every day with some new thing that they wanted added to the company website. The problem was that they wanted each new thing to be front and centre on the home page. Fortunately we didn't do it for them as 1) it would have overloaded the home page and 2) these things would usually only affect less than 1% of customers so they didn't deserve such positioning.

I have noticed HM doing the same recently. On entering the site I see new images, random images and the most popular images from each gallery plus weekly top 10. Plus all the Smackdown images. On the recent change someone put the shoutbox on every page. Is anyone really interested in the top 10 posters? The HP points seem to have no purpose other than counting. It all adds up.

The difference is 'host-push' (the user has to download a lot of imformation, whether they want it or not) versus 'user-pull' (the user seeks out what they want and that is all they download).

I agree a size limit on images would be a good thing, but a file size rather than a resolution size limit would seem to make more sense.
I don't suppose there is anyway to monitor if external sites are hotlinking to images?
The popular images could be a significant problem, I get the feeling some users don't save images but instead come back to view them over and over. Has anyone considerd taking popular images and moving them into a members/gold gallery? Non-members could see a random few each day (like the random picture box). People who post variations of images already up (before and after etc) could be encouraged to upload them elsewhere and link to them in an art thread instead

Apologies for my ramblings, it's late and it was a hard day at work. Of course these ideas may help or may not... I'm sure somebody has the stats, like what galleries use the most bandwidth. That would enable a more focused approach to the problem.

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