Hi All,
The gallery has been causing a huge load on this site transferring over 4 gigs of data per day. This is a direct correlation to the peak 6,000+ unique visitors to apug daily. It's a performance hit on the server and our hosting plan's data transfer allowance that we simply can't allow to continue. I have no choice but to make the gallery "Subscriber" only starting 1 week from today. The subscription service will remain the same as always with rates starting at $12 per year (paypal gets 65cents of that as handling fee). You can even subscribe for 3 month blocks if money is tight. If the gallery is important to you then the $1 a month should not be a big deal.
Some may have concerns about non-subscribers being unable to show any of their work, and we will figure out a way to address this (most likely 3 images allowed to be attached to their user profile page).
There may be concerns that the forum will be next as subscriber only, but this will not happen. Essentially the forum is juggling only text as data which produces very little load and bandwidth compared to images.
There will also be a daily upload limit of 4 images per day to the gallery. All of this combined will:
-reduce our load considerably
-prevent mass uploads that many find annoying, also preventing new users from registering and moments later uploading 2 megabytes of images to our server
I anticipated this might happen one day, but not so soon. I think the recent surge in traffic has left us with few alternatives in some areas of the site.
I hope everyone can understand stability and maintaining costs are key to the longevity of APUG.
If you use the gallery and do not plan to subscribe, you have 1 week to copy down your images from the gallery if neccessary.
Thanks!
Sean
The gallery has been causing a huge load on this site transferring over 4 gigs of data per day. This is a direct correlation to the peak 6,000+ unique visitors to apug daily. It's a performance hit on the server and our hosting plan's data transfer allowance that we simply can't allow to continue. I have no choice but to make the gallery "Subscriber" only starting 1 week from today. The subscription service will remain the same as always with rates starting at $12 per year (paypal gets 65cents of that as handling fee). You can even subscribe for 3 month blocks if money is tight. If the gallery is important to you then the $1 a month should not be a big deal.
Some may have concerns about non-subscribers being unable to show any of their work, and we will figure out a way to address this (most likely 3 images allowed to be attached to their user profile page).
There may be concerns that the forum will be next as subscriber only, but this will not happen. Essentially the forum is juggling only text as data which produces very little load and bandwidth compared to images.
There will also be a daily upload limit of 4 images per day to the gallery. All of this combined will:
-reduce our load considerably
-prevent mass uploads that many find annoying, also preventing new users from registering and moments later uploading 2 megabytes of images to our server
I anticipated this might happen one day, but not so soon. I think the recent surge in traffic has left us with few alternatives in some areas of the site.
I hope everyone can understand stability and maintaining costs are key to the longevity of APUG.
If you use the gallery and do not plan to subscribe, you have 1 week to copy down your images from the gallery if neccessary.
Thanks!
Sean