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Hi All,

You might have seen in another thread that we're having to take some measures to try and reduce the amount of bandwidth that ICB uses, as we're smashing out hosting limits by some considerable margin. While we have taken steps to limit the likes of search engine bots scouring size content at depth and on a regular basis, we should also be looking at making small changes that, over time, can make some difference. Such small things include now many topics are listed per forum page. It was 50, now it's 25, so each time someone looks at a forum page it should be less traffic.

Another item I want to look at now is Avatar size. We're reasonably generous at the moment with a 40KB limit and 100x100 pixels. I want to reduce this to [b:rregdwkz]15KB[/b:rregdwkz]. The vast majority of uploaded avatars fall well under this, including ones that are photos of users. There are a few outliers, usually animated avatars that are larger. Although I hate to do this, even small changes like this can make a difference. Put it this way, at 15 posts per page, and up to 40KB per avatar, that's 600KB just for looking at a forum topic. Dropping the limit would reduce this to 225KB (maybe the limit should be lower!).

So, if your avatar suddenly vanishes, I do apologise, but I hope you understand as we try to streamline the bandwidth usage of ICB.

Thanks.

PS, just realised my current avatar also goes over that 15KB limit, so I'll be seeing if I can save it at a higher compression rate (yep, resaved it and it went from 24KB to 8KB).

PS, as a tip, if you have a photo avatar, make sure it's saved as a JPG, and if you can, apply a 40-60% quality setting while saving it. It gives good compression at minimal quality loss. Have a play and see how low you can go <!-- s:) --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!-- s:) -->

is that why my avatar animation seems to have stopped <!-- s:o --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_surprised.gif" alt="" title="Surprised" /><!-- s:o -->

Pro tip
If you have a simple plain colour avatar saving as a .gif will drop the size a good deal.

Absolutely. Simple line art, gif, continuous colour/photos, jpg.

Kieron, yeah, I went and grabbed all the avatars that were over the new limit and tried resaving them. Of course the animated ones got chopped. Sorry!

At least I know now. I was going to upload it again to see what was up.