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IMPORTANT Note on Posting Photos on This Website

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Well I’m happy to pay to play. I already pay and donate on top. And I’m ok with that as I feel this is my local ride peops as opposed to the other site ( even though I have many friends there). But I don’t know if many others would be as “generous?” With their play money as me? Nor should be expected to. 

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5 hours ago, Covered in Dust said:

Let’s get Ted to host us overnight. He makes a mean Manhattan 

I prefer the kind Manhattan. But I shall endeavor to enjoy. 

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Seems I missed this thread about photos on the site. Lots of catching up for me to do. Short version is that we can afford to host tons of photos and nobody should feel limited. If anyone is reaching file size limits, contact me. 

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@Hawkins

I think an idea floated earlier in this thread has merrit.

Users that want to host a lot of pictures pay a small space fee to help offset the cost of hosting the site.
Maybe some math to figure out what the max space needed to host existing pictures and calculate a growth rate.
That then could be factored into the cost analsysis to come up with a per user $$ which should be pretty small

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3 hours ago, DSM8 said:

Users that want to host a lot of pictures pay a small space fee to help offset the cost of hosting the site.

I don't have access to club financials so I'll happily leave decisions like this to said leadership. I think the big rides that are put on 1-2 times a year, like Mountain Dash and Desert Dash, pay for the site and then some. Taking my admin hat off, as a paid club member and as a geek in general, I am okay with paying a few dollars a month to be a member of a club/organization provided I believe in what they are doing and I get something for my money. If we had a sticker for our bikes, a bumper sticker for our 4-wheeled vehicles, or a good-looking logo on a shirt or jersey, I'd gladly display them which would be another way to get revenue into the club's coffers. The cost of hosting the site isn't extreme. Even at a paltry $3/month, about 35 supporting members would pay for all the hosting (monthly), domain names (annually), and leave a little in the kitty for nifty things like SEO, advertising, paid themes, plugins, and APIs.

As for storage space, we have plenty. The main issue is that it was previously set to unlimited per user, which is bad practice. Rhetorical question, but what do you do when a few users are using 100's of MB or even GB of data, while the other 95% of users are using 10's of MB? That's a hard genie to put back in the bottle. I picked a random number and obviously picked too low. I'm adjusting so that nobody bumps their head on the limits.

*UPDATE* Case in point on disk space usage: I was just contacted by a user that cannot currently add more pics. That user has 2,950 MB of files uploaded, which takes 73 pages to display when I am viewing their files. Is this a problem? No, because we want all users to share their love of motorcycling (and in this user's case, photography) with this group. That being said, if even 10% of our nearly 3,000 members used 3,000 MB of storage, that would be (300 users x 3,000 MB = 900,000 MB) right at 1 TB of space. That is approximately 5-6x the total storage that we have available currently and would more than double our hosting costs. The good news is that 10% of our users don't fall into this category. The difficulty is handling the users that do in such a way that it works equitably for all involved.

Edited by Hawkins
added UPDATE at the bottom
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Hooray!  And thank you Jesse for all you do for the site and club.

Youda man.

IMG_3863.thumb.JPG.e6f8f0d7e28cedfdf0eaf2edd0b3cfa3.JPG

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That's a start.  It took me to your iCloud and I can see the pic of the little girl.

To be practical, we would want the pic to show in your post though instead of the link.

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Disclaimer: I often come across forcefully. I've been a foster dad to many teenagers, I have 5 of my own kids (3 biological and 2 adopted), and I've managed people and ran departments. I saw all this to at least explain if not excuse my forcefulness. My saving grace is that I am willing to hear all sides of a given situation, and if presented with new data, reconsider my position. @Covered in Dust was kind enough to reach out after I wrote this message and clarify some finer points as well as invite me to future rides. Good guy, that one. Anyway, writing this to explain that there is no anger in the message below. I am simply doing what I feel is right, justified, and logical. It has likely been a while since this forum had that kind of guidance, so like all new things, change can be hard. Thank you all for your patience. Back to the show circus!

 

Addressing this comment:

On 8/15/2022 at 8:10 AM, Zubb said:

I guess until there becomes a way to post links to iCloud, I am done posting pics here.  And that bums me out.

And this one:

On 8/15/2022 at 11:36 AM, paulmbowers said:

I don't know of a way to post iCloud content using a link.

This works provided you use the URL and not the image itself. Here is proof from my own iCloud instance, compliments of my daughter: https://share.icloud.com/photos/034ESJ4evRtbUUvCB5WUngT9g. I can make a tutorial on how to do this if you'd like.

 

On 8/15/2022 at 12:11 PM, Covered in Dust said:

I just don’t care for arbitrary rules.

I don't feel that storage limits are arbitrary. Someone has to pay for the storage, and this group doesn't have reoccurring dues. Our current hosting provider, which I am in the market to migrate away from, charges $0.10/GB per month (as shown here: https://www.linode.com/products/block-storage/) just for storage. We pay additional money per month for the CPU/memory/networking/IP/etc. If you're a user with ~3 GB of files on our server, then SDAR pays about $0.30/month - just to store your photos. Literally not much more than pennies on the per-person scale, but we have nearly 3,000 members, and 100's of those are active members. Those pennies become dollars quickly. So these rules are not arbitrary, they are part and parcel to running a sustainable online community with sane limits on expenses when there are no regular revenue streams. You'll be hard-pressed to find any sizeable online community with free, unlimited storage.

 

On 8/15/2022 at 3:20 PM, Bagstr said:

Question - My assumption is this limit is for all time and never resets?

Also - A member needs to be a supporting person to attach a non- hosted photo.

That is currently a correct assumption. At this time we don't have auto archiving or thread locking emabled. This thread is a perfect example of why we should! Started in 2007, which was 15 years ago, this thread is still here accepting comments and posts. Furthermore, the opening post is largely out of date and serves to confuse users. Because things are never archived, locked, or stripped (images removed), the disk space is never reclaimed, the databases never shrink, etc.

Also, and this is something that I need to task my moderators with, threads often veer off topic. Case in point, this thread again! Looks like @paulmbowers and @Covered in Dust are planning a ride. GREAT! We love to see that. There are two problems though: (1) this is a thread about posting photos to the site and (2) as of right now it has 6,597 views and 3 followers so at least 3 people are getting notifications about this ride and likely thousands of people will have to scroll past an unrelated exchange about an upcoming ride. Moderators should be removing posts like that so that conversations stay on topic and in their specific category. It makes a better experience for all users.

Edited by Hawkins
added a disclaimer
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7 minutes ago, Zubb said:

To be practical, we would want the pic to show in your post though instead of the link.

Agreed, and depending on the service you are linking to the links can be "expanded" to show you what you're linking to without using up disk space on the server. Example: 

 

However, iCloud doesn't seem to be supported by this version of Invision Community (the software that runs our forum). Apple is famously restrictive when it comes to working with 3rd party providers and they make money when you use their tools so they have little incentive to make it easier for users to get data in and out of their ecosystem.

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2 hours ago, Hawkins said:

This works provided you use the URL and not the image itself. Here is proof from my own iCloud instance, compliments of my daughter: https://share.icloud.com/photos/034ESJ4evRtbUUvCB5WUngT9g. I can make a tutorial on how to do this if you'd like.

Sure- but it's not embedded- requires clicking on the link, then returning to the forum to read the rest of, say, CiD's non-offensive posting.18821683233_0debab0d5a_b.jpg

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18 minutes ago, paulmbowers said:

CiD's non-offensive posting.

I added a disclaimer to my own post trying to explain that I'm not trying to be offensive.

I am right. We don't have unlimited storage and something has to be put in place to prevent the top 10 or so users from using so much space that the rest of us are asked to pay for their use of our filesystem. Please remember that I have more insight into how the system is used that most if not all other users. This is a problem that will be addressed, and it will be addressed using standard best practices like limits on total file uploads.

I should have said my piece more kindly. That being said, my background is tech, not PR. When you said, "I don't know of a way to post iCloud content using a link", and I provided not only proof that it was possible but offered to make a tutorial, I expected at least a thank you. Instead, I get complaints that the image doesn't embed - which I have already explained in a post further up this thread. As CiD said to me in a direct message, this is a thankless job. It is also one I do voluntarily. Sometimes I do get tired of helping fix what it ultimately a very fixable problem only to get told that someone doesn't like my solution. I'll do my level best to accommodate the community in such a way that the greater majority of users benefit from the changes being made. If that makes a few users grumpy, tough. There is no main character in this community; it is for the great good of all that we continue to refine processes, come up with new solutions, and ultimately do better.

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15 minutes ago, Hawkins said:

something has to be put in place to prevent the top 10 or so users from using so much space that the rest of us are asked to pay for their use of our filesystem. .

not sure I would call that their use of the file system; Aren’t we all here for content? Maybe another way of looking at it is top posters are fueling the forum and should be rewarded to post? 

thanks for your time/work.

Edited by kato
Forgot to thank the webmasta

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10 minutes ago, kato said:

not sure I would call that their use of the file system; Aren’t we all here for content? Maybe another way of looking at it is top posters are fueling the forum and should be rewarded to post? 

I would 100% call it their use of the file system. Here is why:

1164725117_ScreenShot2022-08-16at6_05_50PM.thumb.png.074ec9727137c1d22447f9175dac1269.png

This shows the top 16 files ranked by size. I've obscured the owner of these files because I don't know the best way to approach this yet. The key takeaway is the red arrows. That is almost 7 GB of data that has in some cases sat there for multiple years without a single download. That isn't growing a community, it is bad policy that needs to be rethought to stop even unintentional abuse like this. We don't have bad actors among us, but we do have bad policies in place that allow even the best-intentioned among us to have a negative impact on our community. Good rules enforced fairly and evenly build good communities.

It is commonplace to upload videos to YouTube instead of to individual forum servers. Of the top 16 files shown, all 16 are videos. And that means all 16 could be uploaded to YouTube and then linked rather than embedded.

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Another way that can help with storage space is compressing images before attaching.  You can download apps that will allow you to compress images to very small sizes without losing too much quality.  I use an iPhone and have a shortcut set up that does that for me.  
This example was originally 3.3mb but a quick compress and I shrunk it to less than 300kb.  I could have been less aggressive and the quality would be better, but simply wanted to illustrate the difference in file size.  

If someone wanted a hi-rez copy of a photo they could always reach out directly to the poster? 

thanks for everything you are doing @Hawkins 

 

C4427659-0E7A-4889-97AA-DC40C0F0F767.jpeg

Edited by IanT
Fixed a typo

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1 hour ago, IanT said:

Another way that can help with storage space is compressing images before attaching.

Don't even get me started on the ~40 MB PNGs that some users have uploaded. *rolls eyes*

Thanks for the helpful advice!

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14 hours ago, Hawkins said:

I should have said my piece more kindly.

I'm looking back on your posts, and can't find anywhere that you've been unkind at all.

I'm sorry for giving you that impression- CiD and I have a banter that might be misunderstood.

We're all good.

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Hawkins, thanks for all you are doing.

Many of you know my dog and I are on the road for the next couple of years and I don't have time or internet access to constantly monitor what's going on here. And for those who don't know me, I am the owner and founder of SDAR.

Jesse Hawkins contacts me sometimes when he wants my input and opinion on certain issues. He is doing A LOT behind the scenes that you all don't know about. 

I trust Hawkins is doing his very best in the interest of our community here and to do what's right to fix many problems we've had over the years, we've never had anyone dig deep into the forum software like Jesse has.

Again, many thanks and Jesse is spot on about his evaluations and limitations on posting photos.

KTMrad - President and Founder 

Edited by KTMrad
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18 hours ago, IanT said:

 I use an iPhone and have a shortcut set up that does that for me.  

Help a brother out . . . name of app please?

I take the highest res pics I can, and resizing them down is a real chore because ... I don't know how in iCloud.  It's stupid easy in Flickr, but I fired them awhile back.

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By the way, upon re reading my earlier post I realize it sounded like I was going to pick up my toys and not play anymore.  That was not my intent at all, I'm just frustrated that my whole photo related infrastructure (apple) doesn't play well on this forum.

I'm going to dig into Jesse's iCloud tip above again and see if I can "do better".

And Jesse, thanks again for the hard work you've put into this.  I have nothing but appreciation for it.  Sometimes my/our banter can be easily interpreted as course or jabby.  I always assume is not meant that way and hope others will do the same.  Because it's pretty much always not.

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5 hours ago, Zubb said:

Help a brother out . . . name of app please?

I take the highest res pics I can, and resizing them down is a real chore because ... I don't know how in iCloud.  It's stupid easy in Flickr, but I fired them awhile back.

Hi Kelly,

This app is pretty popular for iPhone:  https://apps.apple.com/us/app/image-size/id670766542

I don’t use it myself as I downloaded a shortcut which I found easier.  Here is the link I used to download a pre-made shortcut, although I did then edit mine a little. 
https://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-reduce-photos-file-size-on-iphone-ipad/

I hope that helps?

ps sounds like your collarbone is healing, which is great news.

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