partial solution to bandwidth problem: avatars?

[Chooco]

AVATARS!

how about having people put their own avatars on and disallowing avatars from anandtech? each avatar is like 3KB and there's like 80,000 members here who check out the board.......that can rack up lots of MB pretty fast.

if people put their own personal avatars, it will help calm down the lag, lower cost and make each avatar different
think about it

 

[Jason Clark]

Nope, we will not allow people to upload images to our servers or link to them.

Thanks.

 

[Chooco]

um no that's not what i meant.
there has to be a way so that the link is directly from that source and not from the database.

i run a free forum and it has that feature.....
check out my avatar:
my avatar

well how about disabling avatars all together?

 

[Hossenfeffer]

I think I understand what you're saying. You'd have Fusetalk send a "placeholder" for particular avatars and let the user either download defaults to put there or replace the defaults with their own (a la "skinning" Fusetalk).

Your concern is fine, but Trust that Zuni and the fusetalk folks have brainstormed on a veritable buttload of potential solutions.

 

[Chooco]

the ironic part is that the forum i use is YaBB (free lol)

i'm not sure if fusetalk can do that, vBulletin uses the upload the database like dude said.

check out page here, right click on my avatar and check the location then read the message i posted:
forum avatar

 

[Jason Clark]

Hiya.

1. avatars do not come from a database, they are image urls.
2. the avatars are not what is racking up MB, they aren't even a percent of the bw transfered from the forums the threads and messages are.
3. the image has to come from somewhere, and we will not allow images to be linked from anywhere but our servers.

Thank you.

 

[Chooco]

how do you mean that avatars are not the huge bandwidth eater?

what is the big eater then? i right clicked and selected view source to see the size of this thread but it wouldn't tell me. the avatars really do make a difference.

 

[Jason Clark]

I really can't explain it all without going into a long description of stats etc. Sorry, it isn't going to happen.