UBB.Developers Forums General Discussion Suggestions and Feedback Oh the things users do...

We had been using the Picture Post feature on our board, the one that allows the user to post their little picture with their post (like cute little me on the left). Our users are pretty new to the whole Internet thang, so many didn't know how to post these pictures. Someone suggested one of the many new Photo sites on the net that allow you to store photos.

Well somebody changed their profile to start using a photo on one of these sites. Then they went out and posted a bunch of messages. Well guess what? Their link was to a password secured site! So everytime someone visited a thread they posted to, up popped a userid/password prompt. Oh man did I start getting messages from users wanting to know what the heck was going on.

So for now we've shut that feature off. []/w3timages/icons/frown.gif[/] It's too bad too cuz I liked it. But then the forum is much faster without it. Seems that many people were linking to photos on geocities, homestead and so on and they were so slow that it was slowing up the page display.

SitStay Dog

[:red]Now throw the ball!
http://www.sitstay.com

It seems to me that eileen had a hack which allowed the users to uplload pictures to be stored on her server, so that she didn't have to deal with problems like that... This would have been about six months ago...? Eileen? []/w3timages/icons/wink.gif[/]

matt

Phoenix did the original hack. I added a few bits and pieces. It's all in this thread: http://www.wwwthreads.com/perl/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=wishlist&Number=5642&page=&view=&sb=&vc=1#Post5642

[]http://www.amdragon.com/images/eileensig.gif[/]

I thought about that but I looked at the "real" photos that people are using. In many cases they aren't cropping it to the size it should be. They are instead taking some massive photo (1024x1024) and letting the width and height setting in the squeeze it down to the size it should be. So we still have the problem of it slowing the board down cuz the graphics are still huge. I don't know of a routine that will resize them on the server do you? If I could get that then I could run a job after they download it to resize it to the proper size.

Any more ideas? I'd like to add this feature back in...

SitStay Dog

[:red]Now throw the ball!
http://www.sitstay.com

Only allow a very small bytesize for the upload...

[]http://www.amdragon.com/images/eileensig.gif[/]

Eileen's right, limiting the file size is the only realistic thing you can do. There are programs and scripts that allow you to manipulate image files, but generally, they're pretty server intensive. I'm betting that many hosts would look down on this if used regularly. But if you want to try it anyway, I can go dig one of these programs up and post it here if you'd like.

Hello,

>> I don't know of a routine that will resize them on the server do you? <<

Well, I don't know if that is matching this needs, but http://www.truespectra.com deals with some Imaging Server tools. Just for your information - and as I said, I don't know if those tools could help...

Carsten

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Carsten Müller, Hamburg (Germany)