For info: New image upload limits on TRL

[John Drake]

We moved the site across to a new server last week, and in the process we discovered that we had accumulated a massive amount of uploaded image files over the years, we're talking hundreds of thousands, ranging from small avatars to enormous video files of several hundred megabytes apiece, because we'd never set upload limits per user.

This meant the site had grown to a size where it was getting impossible to move without losing some of this stuff first.

Filleting through thousands of images individually was never an option, so we set on bulk deleting anything over 1Mb in size that were older that this year. That alone reduced the uploads folder from 14Gb to 4GB (still big, but just about manageable) but like any bulk deletion process, it means you lose some of the good stuff as well as a lot of the old garbage, hence quite a number of avatars have now been replaced with broken links or blank spaces - the forum itself compensates for a blank avatar by using the first letter of your username instead.

To prevent this situation happening again, we've now had to set upload limits for all users, to restrict uploads to small avatars and optimised image files. Many users had uploaded raw camera image files which can be 10-20Mb apiece, when they really should have been optimised for web beforehand which can reduce them in size often to less than 100kb with no loss of quality.

Each user now has a 5Mb upload limit, requiring them to manage their own resources a little bit better, rather than just dumping hundreds of enormous files onto our server.

Ideally, we would prefer users to host their images elsewhere, and just link to them on here, which means we don't have to store them at all on our server. 

There are lots of free image hosting sites where images can be uploaded, such as https://imgbb.com/ - a Google search turns up many more.

Then, just using the 'Insert image from URL' option on here means the image can be displayed on the forum just the same as before, but without impacting on our server or the user's upload file limit.

Feel free to upload a new avatar image, but please ensure it's nice n' small before you do. These images are only displayed small on here anyway, they don't need to be any bigger than they appear on screen when you upload them.

Thanks