Bandwidth at Dissensus

All things considered, should we remove the forum's ability to upload image files?

  • Yes

    Votes: 15 83.3%
  • No

    Votes: 3 16.7%

  • Total voters
    18

Woebot

Well-known member
Don't know if anyone noticed, but we ran out of bandwidth a couple of days ago.

The way the site is I paid $800 a year or so ago for a "lifetime" website contract.

The problem is that the bandwidth is capped. We haven't gone over it previously but it seems now that there's quite a bit more traffic on the site (what is it with the 100 invisible guests? sign up and get yourselves avatars my friends) and consequently.....

Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm very happy to keep footing the bill, as I do with the vBulletin software updates, but equally I suppose some people might feel like they want to contribute?
 

john eden

male pale and stale
We also ran out of bandwidth for one day at the end of a month recently, iirc.

How much do you pay for extra bandwidth?

If people want to contribute then it should be easy to whack a paypal button somewhere on the site?
 

blubeat

blubeat
Am I right in thinking you allow people to host images? I am sure I have seen threads with links like dissensus/uploads/pic.jpg. These sorts of things can be killers and there are plent of alternatives - flickr, imgshack, etc. While its lovely of you to offer it here, if you do, then maybe removing it would help.

Also you can stop other sites from linking to your hosted pictures which can also be a killer.

God forbid a story gets Dugg - a lot of sites getting hammered by this web2.0 traffic.
 

bassnation

the abyss
We also ran out of bandwidth for one day at the end of a month recently, iirc.

How much do you pay for extra bandwidth?

If people want to contribute then it should be easy to whack a paypal button somewhere on the site?

a paypal button is a great idea - would be more than willing to contribute.
 

Anderai

Active member
Yep, after lurking about here for about a year and registering recently, I'd certainly be happy to throw a wee bit of money your way to keep things ticking over....
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
I'd be happy to put some money in, but would that compromise your status if you ever chose to sell Dissensus to google for a billion quid?
 

Woebot

Well-known member
Am I right in thinking you allow people to host images? I am sure I have seen threads with links like dissensus/uploads/pic.jpg. These sorts of things can be killers and there are plent of alternatives - flickr, imgshack, etc. While its lovely of you to offer it here, if you do, then maybe removing it would help.

Also you can stop other sites from linking to your hosted pictures which can also be a killer.

yeah that's a good point. i don't know how everyone would feel about not being able to upload images?

i don't know how to stop other sites linking to images though i suspect the vB software takes care of it....
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
It is very good points blubeat makes. I think blocking external referrers to images might be a setting on the server though, rather than the vB software? Should make quite a big difference I think.
 

blubeat

blubeat
It is very good points blubeat makes. I think blocking external referrers to images might be a setting on the server though, rather than the vB software?

http://www.besthostratings.com/articles/prevent-hot-linking.html

A hot-linking is when some other site uses images hosted on yours. For example a.com has some pretty nice images. Then b.com decides that instead of hosting these images on their server, they can just link from their pages to the images hosted on site a.com.
Hot-linking usually is bandwidth and of course content stealing. The b.com site will not pay for the traffic used as the image is being loaded from site a.com.

So it is a good practice to prevent images hot-linking:

You can prevent the hot-linking of your images by creating a .htaccess file with the following content:

==
RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?your-domain.com/.*$ [NC]

RewriteRule \.(gif|jpe?g|png)$ - [F]
==

The above code will result in a broken image to be displayed when it is hot-linked.

The example above works for .gif,.jpg and .png files, but you can add any file extension.

If you place the .htaccess file in the main folder of your site it will disable hotlinking for all your site.

To block other type of files, just add their extension to the list above. For example to block movie files:

RewriteRule \.(mov|avi|wmv|mpe?g)$ - [F]

The Hot-Linking prevention is based on an Apache module called ModRewrite. So your web host should support it in order for you to be able to use these on your site.
 

blubeat

blubeat
In addition to preventing hotlinking disable the ability for people to upload - or even make it a (paid) subscriber only feature. No-one needs to upload into your site when there are so many free alternatives. Let someone else take the strain. Now that Pirate Bay is doing unlimited hosting of files up to 100MB without any sign up is there really any need for you to offer this when it is most likely one of the causes of your bandwidth issues?
 

Woebot

Well-known member
thanks for that code bluebeat that's very useful.

though after 5 years of posting pics at woebot.com believe me i know what hotlinking is!

to be honest, looking at the stats, i really don't think it's a problem at dissensus.

-

the real question for me though is whether people would be happy for me to switch off the image upload function at dissensus.

i suppose it's a question of whether we want to be part of the problem or the solution? lol.
 

dHarry

Well-known member
bandwidth exceeded again last night - time to switch off those images! or ask for donations for extra bandwidth...
 

Woebot

Well-known member
switched off the images this morning and cleared all the old images out of the database.

bought another 10 gig.

i'm def on the case with this.
 

Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
No, I'm sure it's quite understandable that you'd rather stick with your current hosting, what I meant was, who's contributed to the fund? Turn the thread into a bragging contest :)
 
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