Hi Arvo,
I am sorry, if I sound sometimes not exact, but English is not my mother language, so sometime sit is difficult to expülain things in the right words..
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Looking at my CP, then I've allowed admin messages, thereby this received mail at least can't be considered as spam....
correct
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Last time it was about 128kB limit for images - that may be enough for discussing image composition or overall colors, but is too small for any deeper technical talk about image (jpg artefacts kill noise, details and colors and so on - you know that all). I can understand that storage space is not unlimited though...
We are thinking about some changes regarding image size in KB. This would then probably go in line with the offer of Clubmemberships to finance the bigger space somehow. But it is yet too early to go here into detail. We are doing all this beside our own job as a hobby. So our time is limited and often we can not do things as fast as we would like them to do.
You have to be aware, that there are many things we have to do on a almost daily basis behind the curtain for all our forums, what you as a user can not see. So there is not much time left at the moment to do other stuff, although I would have liked to do it already months ago
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IMHO it should be acceptable that links to external images are allowed, if crops or downsamples of same images are uploaded/attached....
You know, the problem stays always the same. The link to an external image will break sooner or later. This is not a guess. This is the experience we made over the last 9 years while running photo-forums.
So this is not a question of "if", it is only a question of "when" a link to an external image does not work anymore.
And the only solution to avoid this nightmare, is to host the images on our own server. The reason for broken links do not have to be caused only from outside. Also we could be responsible for this. For example if we would switch this forum software, the links to the images would not be working anymore. But because we have the images here, we can always recover them and renew the links, so that you will not see any difference. This would not be the case with external links.
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Does your hosting provide reliable backups? Every week some big crash happens (T-Mobile Sidekick for example), where entire database is lost (and sometimes irrecoverably). I know that external images vanish sometimes, but same can be said about forums content. Duplicating information (by allowing external links) will IMHO make content even more valuable.
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Do not worry. We have an expensive, but very good webhoster, who deals manily with companies and not with private persons. They make daily backups for us etc. You can not handle a photoportal in the size of Camera-info with cheap virtual servers for students
So we pay significantly more then for the well known webhosters who target mainly private people, but we get for this also more service and above all more quality in server, webhosting and security. :z04_nic_0075:
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What about donations - sorry, but your style seems sometimes way too aggressive. I could understand monthly fee (although I personally probably would not join the club then), but repeated asking for donations is uncommon (again just my experience - maybe it is more common on forums, where I don't participate). Some notes about donation channels won't hurt of course.
Don't take all above personally - I'm also interested in forum quality and viability, just sometimes some unclear or disturbing aspects need to discuss about.
We thought that donation would fit more into the "american style", instead of monthly clubmemberships for just a few poeple who are interested in it.
But as far as I can see over the last 5 months, we might be wrong at least in the Sigma forum. Ta Hasselbladinfo.com. Leicainfo.com and Contaxinfo.com, users donate a lot more often.
At our german websites, we do not offer donations at all. It is not the mentality to donate for a forum. They prefree to become clubmember with additional features and monthly or yearly payments incl. autorenewal.
So we might try this more on the English forums too in the not so distant future, as soon as we have more time to imple,mnet those things technicaly.
But on the other hand this would also mean, that some features are then mor limited for non-clubmembers. Because there have to be obviously a difference between the normal member and a club-member, otherwise nobody will have an incentive to become Clubmember... :z04_weihnachten018:
Best wishes