Would quoting only the person you're replying to cut down on

[MrMungus]

bandwidth?

Just a suggestion. Would make reading easier, too.

[SLK001]

No, but getting rid of the avatars will.

[The village idiot]

So would killing signatures, and killing pictures in posts, as would killing emoticons. While we're at it, lets go back to just text, everyone go out and grab a copy of lynx for your browser. Or we could just treat this like a newsgroup. It would get very dull. The up side of a newsgroup is that you could PLONK people you don't feel like conversing with 8)

Now it would be nice if everyone would only quote the relevent part of a post, and only if it need be quoted, not all posts need to be quoted to remember what was said in a previous post.

[MrMungus]

Now it would be nice if everyone would only quote the relevent part of a post, and only if it need be quoted, not all posts need to be quoted to remember what was said in a previous post.

Well, I was just responding to the various info about the massive bandwidth bills incurred here.

Actually, images could be eliminated here if people would use a service like http://www.imagedump.com/ to post pics when they need to.

I could do without avatars and images in sigs. Pretty unnecessary.

I think one improvement that would help cut back on the unnecessary quoting would be to have a "reply" button that lets you reply without a quote instead of having that button up at the top of the page.

[Baldrick]

No, getting rid of huge signatures will.

/Baldrick at dvd r help dot com

[The village idiot]

Quoting that one would be even more annoying.

BTW, there is a post reply button at the bottom of the page too, that way
after you finish reading the entire thread, you can add your thoughts.
That is the button I often use. Opening the forums index, and then the
forum, and then a post in seperate windows also saves bandwidth. That
way you don't need to refresh the index for each forum, or the main
index each time you want to read another post. I learned that one from
using dial-up.

[Will Hay]

I think you need to trust that if something becomes a problem, it will be sorted.
Getting rid of the avatars?
Man!
Will

[housepig]

No, getting rid of huge signatures will.

/Baldrick at dvd r help dot com

Baldrick - could you maybe stitch 4 copies of that one together, so it's twice as wide and twice as long? I'm just not sure if it's legible at this size....

[MrMungus]

I think you need to trust that if something becomes a problem, it will be sorted.
Getting rid of the avatars?
Man!
Will

Then why is there a Feedback forum?

[elkfir]

No, getting rid of huge signatures will.

If they're all like Baldrick's, the more huge signatures the better!!!

[Will Hay]

I think you need to trust that if something becomes a problem, it will be sorted.
Getting rid of the avatars?
Man!
Will

Then why is there a Feedback forum?

yep, okay, you got me, good one.
I was simply saying that I can't see how these tiny issues suggested are going to have impact on a problem, if any, suffered.
My point was that if it was an issue it would have been done by now.
I was actually referring to the avatar suggestion, but as someone quite rightly pointed out, this is what makes this site so diverse and wonderful.
Anyway, the quoting thing, wha tdo you suggest, it's written into the AUP?
Man, the moderators have enough time ensuring posts are made in the corrrect place without re-writing posts.
Please understand something, my response wasn't an atatck on your character (which I'm sure is wonderfully upstanding), don't take it as such; I know what the feedback section is for.
Your post was valid, just because I disagree doesn't mean I can't raise a point of my own, right?
Will Hay

[MrMungus]

I think you need to trust that if something becomes a problem, it will be sorted.
Getting rid of the avatars?
Man!
Will

Then why is there a Feedback forum?

yep, okay, you got me, good one.
I was simply saying that I can't see how these tiny issues suggested are going to have impact on a problem, if any, suffered.
My point was that if it was an issue it would have been done by now.
I was actually referring to the avatar suggestion, but as someone quite rightly pointed out, this is what makes this site so diverse and wonderful.
Anyway, the quoting thing, wha tdo you suggest, it's written into the AUP?
Man, the moderators have enough time ensuring posts are made in the corrrect place without re-writing posts.
Please understand something, my response wasn't an atatck on your character (which I'm sure is wonderfully upstanding), don't take it as such; I know what the feedback section is for.
Your post was valid, just because I disagree doesn't mean I can't raise a point of my own, right?
Will Hay

Just making a suggestion. Just because someone is running something, it doesn't mean they know everything about running it. I take suggestions on my specialties all the time (gratefully).

The thing about avatars and sigs and quoting is that the little stuff adds up. If you are serving a comment AND a quote, you've just doubled the amount of bandwidth required. DOUBLED!!! If it's quoted again, it's tripled. And on and on. Besides, it's kinda pointless to include quotes that have already been read. I can see it on Usenet where you can't "scroll up" but not on a message board where you can.

[stiltman]

I think you need to trust that if something becomes a problem, it will be sorted.
Getting rid of the avatars?
Man!
Will

Then why is there a Feedback forum?

yep, okay, you got me, good one.
I was simply saying that I can't see how these tiny issues suggested are going to have impact on a problem, if any, suffered.
My point was that if it was an issue it would have been done by now.
I was actually referring to the avatar suggestion, but as someone quite rightly pointed out, this is what makes this site so diverse and wonderful.
Anyway, the quoting thing, wha tdo you suggest, it's written into the AUP?
Man, the moderators have enough time ensuring posts are made in the corrrect place without re-writing posts.
Please understand something, my response wasn't an atatck on your character (which I'm sure is wonderfully upstanding), don't take it as such; I know what the feedback section is for.
Your post was valid, just because I disagree doesn't mean I can't raise a point of my own, right?
Will Hay

Just making a suggestion. Just because someone is running something, it doesn't mean they know everything about running it. I take suggestions on my specialties all the time (gratefully).

The thing about avatars and sigs and quoting is that the little stuff adds up. If you are serving a comment AND a quote, you've just doubled the amount of bandwidth required. DOUBLED!!! If it's quoted again, it's tripled. And on and on. Besides, it's kinda pointless to include quotes that have already been read. I can see it on Usenet where you can't "scroll up" but not on a message board where you can.

curious as to why you have a sig?

I also think if this got really out of hand, Baldrick would do something like limit the picts to be even smaller.

[gll99]

mrmungus wrote

I take suggestions on my specialties all the time (gratefully).

In that case then, I'll take fries and the soup du jour with that.

Just kidding!

Lose the off topic. Lose thousands of members because ot of it. Save tons of bandwidth. Have dull site.

[MrMungus]

curious as to why you have a sig?

I also think if this got really out of hand, Baldrick would do something like limit the picts to be even smaller.

Because I can. I'm saying that images are a problem, not sigs.

How about this: make a donation, get to use an avatar?

:ducks:

[MrMungus]

Lose the off topic. Lose thousands of members because ot of it. Save tons of bandwidth. Have dull site.

Now that's just Crazy Talk.

[Baldrick]

Lose the off topic. Lose thousands of members because ot of it. Save tons of bandwidth. Have dull site.

Great idea!


No, I don't have to lose anything. I have controll over my bandwidth.

[ebenton]

Everybody should just type faster and use a smaller font.

[D_Knife]

just as an interest thing while we are talking about it
this page (before my comment) is 93K
the left hand menu alone is 19K
it's a library item constructed out of tables - you optimize that you could cut the size in half
every person on the site downloads this menu for every page they look at.
Today I have looked at maybe 20-30 topics - that's 380K-570K of menu's only!!! not counting the rest of the page
not a lot in the scheme of things I admit but if I look at some more topics after this then I might make 1 meg of menu's I have dl'd

Baldrick - how many pages are being dl'd today??
That could be a considerable saving if even only the menu is optimized
Just a thought...

[Will Hay]

Close the offtopic forum?
Man, I'd hate to see the thread that does close it!
Will

[offline]

How about this: make a donation, get to use an avatar?

:ducks:

The bigger the donation, the bigger the avatar ? I'll call cocacola see wat they say..

right.. one giant flash 3d spinning logo at 90 Megs .. beautiful!!

[disturbed1]

every person on the site downloads this menu for every page they look at.
Today I have looked at maybe 20-30 topics - that's 380K-570K of menu's only!!! not counting the rest of the page

Just a thought...

It should be cached in a temp file.

The site did go through some gzip compression not too long ago to help minimize the bandwidth.

I wouldn't mind seeing a few more banner ads myself. Tired of looking at the same 2 or 4 companies all the time.

Maybe a forum just for current specials by vendors. Since they seem to try to advert for free here, make 'em donate $X to get posting priv.'s to the vender forum.

What would be real nice is if Canopus, TMPG, _insert_name_here, would pay DVDRHelp for all of the free support customers have recieved for their products.

Or maybe even profit sharing from Ritek, considering the amount of Ritek DVDs that have been sold just from the recomendation here.

[lordsmurf]

I know you're looking at some of this and shaking your head Baldrick.

People, people ... bandwidth is not measured by what's on YOUR screen, but by what is sent. There all kinds of things to consider, including cache, server cache, compression, etc etc.

This site does all it can to reduce bandwidth. Many of the things you're suggesting won't have any real impact at all. The biggest factor here is the amount of visitors.

[offline]

The biggest factor here is the amount of visitors.

I hate to be the one to correct you lordsmurf

..but the biggest factor here is Americans.

maybe get rid of them


edit - Sorry I was wrong, the biggest identifiable group with
shared characteristics here are those with an interest in digital video and DVDR. We should toss those bandwidth wasting hogs out!

[D_Knife]

lordsmurf
couple of points
you are correct in stating that many of the points here are not going to make a single difference in bandwidth
however this site is IMO not doing everything to reduce bandwidth
the pages could be optimised away from masses of nested tables
parts of the menu could be cached - locally cached that is as server caching make no difference to site bandwidth
if you know about HTML code - take a look and you will soon see for yourself
My earlier point about the size/coding of the menu was that the menu consists of code that adds 19K to any page it is included in - and it's included in almost all of the pages served. a quick look at the October stats in the old news section says that 15 000 000 page views per month x 19K is a big number!
I'm not saying there will be a huge saving in optimising the menu or even the page structure but when you add 15 000 000 views to the mix any reduction in lines of code being served is a huge saving.
any page optimisation should be done before page compression as well

[Baldrick]

I'm working on a new design....smaller menu and probably more optimized and using more css. But it will take a couple of months.

All pages are being gzip compressed(if the user browsers supports it, most does), it reduces the page sizes with about 75-90%.

Main page is 112,098 bytes
but with gzip it is only 14,482 bytes
http://www.pipeboost.com/getreport.asp?URL=https://www.videohelp.com/
(NOT including images)

[D_Knife]

That's pretty cool!!
I'm sure if you asked lots of people would help contribute to a site update
I certainly would!

[MrMungus]

I wouldn't mind seeing a few more banner ads myself.

I keep thinking Adsense or Overture contextual ads would be great for this site. But I'm just guessing.

[elkfir]

Sorry, but this thread doesn't seem quite the same without her!

[Baldrick]

I wouldn't mind seeing a few more banner ads myself.

I keep thinking Adsense or Overture contextual ads would be great for this site. But I'm just guessing.

google doesn't like my site...and they doesn't reply to my emails.