The Question and Answer Board

[Bob Zumbrunnen]

I prefer to make this a policy issue rather than adding computer overhead at posting time to check whether or not they've previously included a link.

Also, a brief blurb below the "Text Features" thing when composing a new message explaining that the [ chart ] and [ sound ] tags should only be used when you're linking to a site of your own.

I can, however, programmatically ensure that certain domain names are not permitted in those links. I'll go ahead and work on that this morning. Like you said, this could become a pretty big problem.

I've had people frequently suggest that I make it possible to upload such files to our server, but that's not something that'd be easy from this end, and I'd have to charge separately for it. Quite a bit. There are plenty of companies around who do this for cheap or for free.

http://www.hypermart.net is the one I always recommend. You can set up your own website there and upload stuff to it and link to it as much as you like. For free! Granted, visitors to your site there will see ads displayed by Hypermart, but that's not the case when you just link to your image or sound that's hosted there.

I haven't stepped into that territory because if I'm letting people upload images and sounds to our server, they can basically run a whole website from our server. I'd have to charge extra for that and couldn't charge as little as the sites do who specialize in doing that for a living.

Everyone who uses images and sounds in their messages should have a page at a site like that and for pretty much everything but StockCharts, use only their own site for images and sounds they want to post here. StockCharts images, because of their dynamic nature, should be linked directly to StockCharts. But some consideration is warranted there, too. There's no reason to include 5 different charts in a message. If 1000 different people read that message, StockCharts can get hit with tons of bandwidth usage.

I'm also seriously considering putting in some code to determine the size of an image added to a signature and set an upper limit on the allowable size. Someone (whose name escapes me) who posts on the IDCC board has an enormous image in their signature and not only is it annoying as hell because of the way it widens the message box, if it's not being hosted from their own site, it's costing someone a LOT of bandwidth.

While I wouldn't go so far as to call it "bandwidth theft" (I'd call it "abuse of someone else's bandwidth"), I think it's something everyone needs to be a lot more considerate about. Most of these companies are paying x amount per month for x amount of bandwidth, and when they suddenly get hit with 20MB of bandwidth utilization, it can have a very real and potentially devastating effect on them. Not only in tying up bandwidth for their site's users, but also in huge unexpected bills from their ISP for bandwidth utilization.

I'll work first on excluding certain domains from inclusion in profile images, then will see if there's a way for me to programmatically determine the size of an included file and impose a limit on it.