I feel like the people who constantly add like 10 large sized images are the type of people who wouldnt read this post anyway
Yeah you're right. But it's better to say something publicly, at least to have something to point to when we smash down their post.
Well, now you can reply directly to that person with a link to this thread so that they know better for the next time. :-) @Tenshi: It's called Greentooth. :-)
-Embedded 900px images or 2 pictures at max 1600px? ps. does the green rounded and happy guy have a name?
Undecided about WAYWO image size limit. If we make a 900px rule, we have to enforce it.
Enforcing is potentially a lot of work... these are high-traffic threads, the policing would have to be done every day. It's also a bit emotionally draining, constantly telling people they're wrong, and getting occasional backlash. At least, policing the Work sections is like this already.
Couldn't you use a bot that :
Automatically gives a message to the user if an image size is over 900px.
Or use a bot to automatically delete images over 900px from the post. (after implementation)
Or use a bot to automatically delete posts that contain images over 900px from the thread. (after implementation)
Or have a bot that counts how many times a person goes past the limit so that after a lot of strikes, action is taken against the person (or whatever).
Yeah that's my current thinking. We pay for the development of a script, which parses your input when you hit "Post Reply" and if you're over the limits it prevents the post and pops up a warning explaining why. We'd have to be able to configure # of embeds, max resolution per, prevent PNGs, and limit which threads it applies to (the WAYWOs).
Should we prevent other image hosts? Require you to drag-n-drop/upload? Because if I wanted to get around the limits, that's what I'd do. Or do we need to parse those incoming URLs too?
-Embedded 900px images or 2 pictures at max 1600px? ps. does the green rounded and happy guy have a name?
Undecided about WAYWO image size limit. If we make a 900px rule, we have to enforce it.
Enforcing is potentially a lot of work... these are high-traffic threads, the policing would have to be done every day. It's also a bit emotionally draining, constantly telling people they're wrong, and getting occasional backlash. At least, policing the Work sections is like this already.
You can read about our Greentooth here. -----
Well i think 900px it's a good size,too. You can opt to "force" only
2 images per post + 1 Sketchfab, at first; but if people don't
understand the message, you can limit to only 1 image per post. About
policing, i think you need a group of mods working but at the end it
will cost some veins and hair. It's a hard job...but you can begin
sticking this info in every thread and get some more feedback.
Anyone have a good reason why we should not limit each post to 1 embed? You can choose... image, sketchfab, video, whatever. But you only get one. Seems to me if you can't communicate your update in 1 embed, then you're doing it wrong.
Can we please find a way to disable the insane WAYWO spam in your inbox, it makes me want to never post in a WAYWO thread again and is hauting for months now, thats really all I want. Maybe merge thread answers into one single notification, like "5 new comments on Portfolio Review" "256 new comments on WAYWO"
Anyone have a good reason why we should not limit each post to 1 embed? You can choose... image, sketchfab, video, whatever. But you only get one. Seems to me if you can't communicate your update in 1 embed, then you're doing it wrong.
Are you gonna ban/warn people who posts more then 1 post to get around the limit too then?
@Shrike Can we please find a way to disable the insane WAYWO spam in your inbox, it makes me want to never post in a WAYWO thread again and is hauting for months now, thats really all I want. Maybe merge thread answers into one single notification, like "5 new comments on Portfolio Review" "256 new comments on WAYWO"
You can actually opt out of all email notifications altogether ! At the end of the day they don't really add that much. Without a doubt a nice feature to have, but maybe give disabling them a try just to see how it feels.
I dunno, I like higher res images and the ability to expand them in the lightbox. All that actually matters is file size, but i suppose limiting dimensions is a consistent way to do that. In any case i don't think that the rules should be so black and white, context is needed for example people often post mini tutorials that need to exceed a certain resolution to be legible surely these folks shouldn't be warned for doing that.
Even if you get your JPG below a certain file size, the server re-compresses it anyhow when you attach it. They recompress because they need to strip out any trojan metadata for security reasons. So unfortunately that means size restrictions.
I think what we really need is a script to auto-resize down to whatever our limit is, auto-convert from PNG to JPG, and restrict to 1 embed. This limit would be enabled only for WAYWO. And it would be made clear you could upload whatever size you want in your own thread. Just not in the "public" thread.
Please do post tutorials, but only put a preview in WAYWO.
I think what we really need is a script to auto-resize down to whatever our limit is, auto-convert from PNG to JPG, and restrict to 1 embed. This limit would be enabled only for WAYWO. And it would be made clear you could upload whatever size you want in your own thread. Just not in the "public" thread.
This is probably the best end goal as artist who wants PNG or large sized pictures for their personal thread do not have to create extra JPG's when they post in WAYWO and could just upload their PNG and have it be resized and converted to a JPG for just WAYWO. And anyone that didn't read the rules and just posted a picture would get resized and converted too, meaning you won't have to hand out warnings or bans and keep an eye on the WAYWO thread. This way people can just post beautiful art and not have to think about any rules.
@Shrike Can we please find a way to disable the insane WAYWO spam in your inbox, it makes me want to never post in a WAYWO thread again and is hauting for months now, thats really all I want. Maybe merge thread answers into one single notification, like "5 new comments on Portfolio Review" "256 new comments on WAYWO"
You can actually opt out of all email notifications altogether ! At the end of the day they don't really add that much. Without a doubt a nice feature to have, but maybe give disabling them a try just to see how it feels.
Notifications are easily the best of the new features, I don't want to give it up just because one thread spams it 24/7
This is probably the best end goal as artist who wants PNG or large sized pictures for their personal thread ...
We don't have that script yet, and it will take some time to create it, so for now it's the responsibility of each person to please be considerate of others.
Also, if you are posting PNGs or images over 1mb each in your personal thread, that's bad too, because those take forever to load for most people. Besides being impolite to others (making people wait, wasting mobile data caps, etc.), this reduces the likelihood of you getting good feedback. People tend to just exit a thread that is taking a long time to load.
We won't warn people who do this in their own threads. If they want to hang themselves, that's fine. It's really only a larger issue when they try to do it in a shared thread.
I've started mercilessly editing any multiple images out of the 3d waywo thread, and warning each person who isn't following guidelines. I hate having to do this. But we're starting to see results, so that's helpful.
If this proves to work well in the 3d waywo, we'll try doing this in the 2d and animation waywos too. An automated solution would be better though so we'll continue to push for this.
+1 for the autobot solution. No moderator needed, no bad blood because of warnings and bannings, no excuses, just a machine which does not takes sides or can be discussed with. All hail our robot overlords!
If we are using autobot solution, it would be best to be 100% concise on the rules of images and posting or else you are going to get false negative bans (people truly not intended to post too large images + people who still have not read the thread information yet) . Also having warning is a good idea indeed, maybe give it a mark system where 3 strikes is a ban and your marks reset every half a year or so (just a thought, practicality and implementation is a different story).
If we end up doing a size limit, 400-500kb per image is definitely all that's needed (maybe 300-350kb). I don't think a single image on my folio is above 500kb and I've never heard a complaint.
If we are using autobot solution, it would be best to be 100% concise on the rules of images and posting or else you are going to get false negative bans (people truly not intended to post too large images + people who still have not read the thread information yet) . Also having warning is a good idea indeed, maybe give it a mark system where 3 strikes is a ban and your marks reset every half a year or so (just a thought, practicality and implementation is a different story).
An image resizing script would never issue warnings or bans.
It would merely resize your stuff, and prevent you from posting more than one embed. That's it.
The warnings are only because right now we don't have a script yet, so it's up to each person to be considerate of others.
If we end up doing a size limit, 400-500kb per image is definitely all that's needed (maybe 300-350kb). I don't think a single image on my folio is above 500kb and I've never heard a complaint.
We won't have a size limit. Our server recompresses all uploads, to strip out metadata etc. And it uses the same settings for all images.
If we end up doing a size limit, 400-500kb per image is definitely all that's needed (maybe 300-350kb). I don't think a single image on my folio is above 500kb and I've never heard a complaint.
We won't have a size limit. Our server recompresses all uploads, to strip out metadata etc. And it uses the same settings for all images.
I would argue that the PIXEL ART thread moves relativly slow in comparsion to WAYWO and the others, so in my opinion the max amount of images per post could be increased to 3 maybe. That gives one the chance to post small gif animations. Limitations of image size (pixel and kb) should be enough to make this threat enjoyable with a low bandwith.
I don't know, the biggest problem is actually when people just post too many SS in one post. At least on the 3d thread people don't really post high resolution SS (ofc it happens but not really that often).
People should just leave a link for a higher resolution SS, if anyone really wants to see that 8k sized image they could just open the link lol.
First off, Polycount is great. Thank you (and the other mods/contributors) for your hard work in maintaining this community, and making improvements to facilitate the sharing/giving community environment. Polycount really is different from other communities, and I value what we have here. People work hard, share, give real feedback, and give praise when a member's hard work comes together. I appreciate the honesty here, and that it is not simply another platform to self-promote, but a place for self improvement and community. I started here early in my career, and benefited greatly. I came back in the past few years because I have a very fond outlook on this community and its core members. The effort that it takes to foster this community does not go unnoticed.
Second item: I'm guilty. I've posted lots of PNGs. Not because I think it would be cool or special, but simply that it is the format that my screencapture software (Droplr) uses. It has an odd compression algorithm to keep the filesize at specific sizes, namely <512kb, 512kb, 1MB, 2MB and 4MB. For the screencap size that I generally take, the files are below 1MB, or exactly on 1MB... so I just thought "ah what the heck, it's within the filesize requirements" .. but now that I see that people are having difficulty, it certainly is not fair or courteous. Even though the filesize does not exceed 1MB, it is still excessive in comparison to the lower resolution and unneeded color fidelity. So in the past few months I've made it a point to use Tumblr for hosting. They generally come in at 1280 width, given the format of my site. Still I may have occasionally posted via Droplr screencap, looking for feedback here on work which I do not intend to post to Tumblr. Can't remember why I stopped using the upload feature on the forum, maybe burn from CA.org? OK, too much talk. Moral of the story is: for me it has been convenience, or call it laziness. I've not struggled with slow connections, so I hadn't realized how a little laziness had been seriously affecting members. Sorry for that!
I think the measures you have put in place (the reminder header) will be effective. You may also consider for new members suggesting hosting solutions that automatically compress images and resize (I believe tumblr resizes to 1280 width, not 100% sure though). In addition, I think it is completely acceptable for members to self-police a little to take a load off of the mods, but going back to laziness, I've never bothered to mention it when I see it. Maybe it hadn't seemed worth the time to craft a constructive response that had nothing to do with the artwork.
The idea is ultimately to not have to worry about all this. We would have an automated solution for the high-traffic "shared" threads, a plugin to automatically downsize big images, prevent huge embeds, etc.
We're not there yet though, so for now it's just personal responsibility.
This should be forums side handling, for an art/image sensitive site (that this is) you want the highest res images as possible without destroying bandwidth.
When you add an image to a post, could the forum not create a smaller 'thumbnail' that is loaded? When the image gets clicked it can load the original uploaded image at it's full res... That way lower bandwidth for general browsing but still having the necessary pixels/information that us artists have worked so hard on?
I understand this is dev time but, right now less than 500kb in 2016 is stupidly low, I would much prefer to have the old waywo threads with all their crazy .pngs as I would just let it load for a few minutes and check when it was done. I don't want to have to store 2 pictures every time I render something because other people can't load a page with 1080p images...
......create a smaller 'thumbnail' that is loaded?......
......right now less than 500kb in 2016 is stupidly low, I would much prefer to have the old waywo threads with all their crazy .pngs as I would just let it load for a few minutes and check when it was done. I don't want to have to store 2 pictures every time I render something because other people can't load a page with 1080p images...
Well, to be fair, it's always better to make this site close-to-equally accessible on mobile, and with monthly data limits, 1mb an image isn't quite so little, and would take minutes to load a page worth (which, on the phone, isn't so easy as on the computer)
Second of all, it's inefficient to have to wait minutes for a page to load, even on the desktop, and that's why many people haven't been going to WAYWO to browse the way they used to. A lot of people are posting carelessly large images, and it's adding up.
......create a smaller 'thumbnail' that is loaded?......
......right now less than 500kb in 2016 is stupidly low, I would much prefer to have the old waywo threads with all their crazy .pngs as I would just let it load for a few minutes and check when it was done. I don't want to have to store 2 pictures every time I render something because other people can't load a page with 1080p images...
Well, to be fair, it's always better to make this site close-to-equally accessible on mobile, and with monthly data limits, 1mb an image isn't quite so little, and would take minutes to load a page worth (which, on the phone, isn't so easy as on the computer)
Second of all, it's inefficient to have to wait minutes for a page to load, even on the desktop, and that's why many people haven't been going to WAYWO to browse the way they used to. A lot of people are posting carelessly large images, and it's adding up.
Internet speeds are only getting faster, my phone actually gets 40mb/s where as my internet is only 17mb/s.. either way the internet is only getting faster and polycount has been used to no limits and has managed fine, sure .pngs and anything over 3mb is a pain in the ass to wait for but I really think 500kb is a tad silly, especially when it's forced on everyone. I would much rather have a personal option to allow for full res images or not, if I have fast internet why should I be seeing low quality pictures because the forum is designed with the slowest person in mind? The forums should be designed for the entire audience and if it can't be then don't implement something that forces people down a set way.
I dont really get where the "Wayo images got to big" idea is coming from. The only thing that really seemed to change from past waywo threads is some people doing dumps of 5 or 6 images and those images being like 1-2mb.
Personally I think Polycount should be mobile considerate but not at the expense of the content. The current rules feel like things have swung too far in an effort to contain the bloat. I understand the intent but it went a little far IMO.
I dont see how 2 images max with a 1200 or less width (I dont think height should be capped, if its under the data limit the height shouldnt matter) at under 1mb is excessive in this day and age. Edit: Even facebook allows bigger images at fullscreen.
I dont really get where the "Wayo images got to big" idea is coming from.
There's a 29mb PNG file on the first page of the 3D WAYWO...
Are the majority of images 29mb PNG's? I dont think so. Thats an outlier. And if that happens, thats something thats soooo out of the norm that I would expect mod intervention. Edit: My point is Waywo has always been "big". We shouldnt make it something smaller, just manageable.
The majority aren't "1-2" mb either, they're more like 4-8.
In spite of that 29mb png file that is actually one of the lighter loading pages in WAYWO at only 134mb for every image on the page. Compared to 175mb for page 2 which doesn't contain any 29mb "outliers".
Yet consistently on every single page, the largest images are oversized PNGs
I took a look at the top 36 images in file size going back to 2012 from the first page of waywo. Please note the file types and dimensions. There are many images that are smaller in size and bigger in dimension that are outside the inital 36. Info is here: http://imgur.com/a/Q9ZSd The huge images (file size) are outliers. I was wrong about the specific sizes though and their frquency. Thats on me. But I think my point still stands, wayo has always been big considering the year. This is not and does not to ever appear to have been a file type or dimension problem when it comes to the page loading. It appears to be a file size problem. So why arent we only capping the filzesize? I can understand wanting to keep the dimensions a bit more manageable but under 1000 pixels doesnt make sense. Also the file type shouldnt really matter so long as it hits the size limit. Edit: It should be noted that there are more and more images lost the further back we go. So this is by no means definitive.
I think you've misunderstood my point, when I say "largest images" I mean on average, when you download a page and sort by file size all the PNGs float to the top. Are there some huge jpegs in there? Sure. But by and large they are PNGs.
This is all ignoring the main issue though, I highlighted that 29mb PNG as an example of how bad it gets sometimes. If you want an average look at why these rules exist then look at the first 4 pages of WAYWO 2016 to the last 4 (since these rules have been enforced) and compare the total page sizes:
Page 1: 134 mb
Page 2: 174 mb
Page 3: 74 mb
Page 4: 105 mb
Page 76: 17 mb
Page 77: 20 mb
Page 78: 16 mb
Page 79: 18 mb
You may not like the new rules but you're not the only person browsing this site or using the WAYWO thread. It's a shared thread, everyone wants to participate and it's difficult to do that when the thread is bogged down by people with absolutely no regard for the threads viewability.
I took a look at the top 36 images in file size going back to 2012 from the first page of waywo. Please note the file types and dimensions. There are many images that are smaller in size and bigger in dimension that are outside the inital 36. Info is here: http://imgur.com/a/Q9ZSd The huge images (file size) are outliers. I was wrong about the specific sizes though and their frquency. Thats on me. But I think my point still stands, wayo has always been big considering the year. This is not and does not to ever appear to have been a file type or dimension problem when it comes to the page loading. It appears to be a file size problem. So why arent we only capping the filzesize? I can understand wanting to keep the dimensions a bit more manageable but under 1000 pixels doesnt make sense. Also the file type shouldnt really matter so long as it hits the size limit. Edit: It should be noted that there are more and more images lost the further back we go. So this is by no means definitive.
The huge filesize images are almost always png files though the only time jpgs are large is when someone decides to post a 4k res screenshot.
As Eric mentioned before jpg files are recompressed to strip metadata, so while I might upload a huge image that is very compressed when the server recompresses it to 80% quality it will turn out considerably larger. Sometimes jpg compression reacts differently to certain types of images too, so having a resolution upper limit at least sets some sort of baseline.
The site backend recompresses all uploads, to remove all metadata and any possible malicious junk. That's just the minimum server responsibilty.
We tried a higher compression amount initially, but the image quality suffered, so we chose a lower compression amount.
Also we're using a fast image compressor, not a slow pretty one. So that affects file sizes. It's a pita to wait.
The forum display size is about 904 pixels across or so.
These factors are part of why we chose a 1000 pixel limit.
If we allowed unlimited height, then sizes would easily balloon.
Besides those limits are only for a small section of the site.
In the end though we don't have to justify any of these decisions. Use of this privately-owned forum is not a guaranteed right, for anyone. So don't get too pissy.
We aim to make it as accessible to the widest audience of artists and art-lovers possible. Because in the end we are art practitioners and lovers too, and we love to host a vibrant community of like (and unlike!) minds.
Feel free to discuss what's going on. But if you don't agree with the rules, then post your art outside the waywo's. The internet's a big enough place.
While we're on the subject of WAYWO threads. It feels like these threads have been getting more overrun with people who only post there, and don't contribute in any other way to the community.
This is directly contradictory to the original purpose of these threads, they were meant as a community-update kind of thing, and still are. Not as a way for people just to self-promote their artwork.
We have nothing wrong with promotion. However Polycount is first and foremost a discussion community... wips, critiques, sharing techniques, helping each other with tech problems, creating tools, debating art issues, etc. We want to foster this as much as possible; we feel this is the heart and soul of Polycount.
When some people use the WAYWO threads only as a self-promotion vehicle, this dilutes the community, reduces the usefulness of the site. Basically, it's taking without giving.
We're kicking around some ideas, nothing definitive yet. Maybe the WAYWOs are only open to people with a certain # of posts. Or maybe a certain reputation value (though we generally detest this). Maybe they're generated from your threads, by you clicking an "add to WAYWO" button and choosing one of your embedded images. We want to encourage discussion and contribution.
My suggestion, if you don't have at least 200 posts, you need to post a link to a thread for WAYWO, so people can at least get to interact with the person posting content.
I dunno, many times you are doing stuff that doesn't need a dedicated thread. The post and rep limit thing sound like it might just intimidate new folks, but the add to waywo sounds really cool as a feature in and of itself.
I'm like a silent polycounter...I've been on polycount over 4 years, working in the industry over 1,5 years(yay), I learned a lot here and when I see some question unsolved and I know the answer try to help( that don't happens a lot .. I have like 18 posts a year). Post restrictions it's not a good idea, I would be forced to post a lot more and I probably bail.
The new changes are great, and now WAYWO is far better, we're good now right?
Replies
@Tenshi: It's called Greentooth. :-)
Should we prevent other image hosts? Require you to drag-n-drop/upload? Because if I wanted to get around the limits, that's what I'd do. Or do we need to parse those incoming URLs too?
Just kind of thinking out loud here.
About policing, i think you need a group of mods working but at the end it will cost some veins and hair. It's a hard job...but you can begin sticking this info in every thread and get some more feedback.
About the little rounded guy, thanks.
Can we please find a way to disable the insane WAYWO spam in your inbox, it makes me want to never post in a WAYWO thread again and is hauting for months now, thats really all I want. Maybe merge thread answers into one single notification, like "5 new comments on Portfolio Review" "256 new comments on WAYWO"
You can actually opt out of all email notifications altogether ! At the end of the day they don't really add that much. Without a doubt a nice feature to have, but maybe give disabling them a try just to see how it feels.
The only downside is not getting auto notifications for new threads I reply in. I have to remember to manually hit Add To Favorites.
We have a wishlist item to help solve this.
I think what we really need is a script to auto-resize down to whatever our limit is, auto-convert from PNG to JPG, and restrict to 1 embed. This limit would be enabled only for WAYWO. And it would be made clear you could upload whatever size you want in your own thread. Just not in the "public" thread.
Please do post tutorials, but only put a preview in WAYWO.
Notifications are easily the best of the new features, I don't want to give it up just because one thread spams it 24/7
We don't have that script yet, and it will take some time to create it, so for now it's the responsibility of each person to please be considerate of others.
Also, if you are posting PNGs or images over 1mb each in your personal thread, that's bad too, because those take forever to load for most people. Besides being impolite to others (making people wait, wasting mobile data caps, etc.), this reduces the likelihood of you getting good feedback. People tend to just exit a thread that is taking a long time to load.
We won't warn people who do this in their own threads. If they want to hang themselves, that's fine. It's really only a larger issue when they try to do it in a shared thread.
If this proves to work well in the 3d waywo, we'll try doing this in the 2d and animation waywos too. An automated solution would be better though so we'll continue to push for this.
No moderator needed, no bad blood because of warnings and bannings, no excuses, just a machine which does not takes sides or can be discussed with.
All hail our robot overlords!
It would merely resize your stuff, and prevent you from posting more than one embed. That's it.
The warnings are only because right now we don't have a script yet, so it's up to each person to be considerate of others.
If this gets too intrusive, please let us know. We should probably strive to keep a balance between ease-of-browsing and ease-of-posting.
Threads With Embed Limits
Limitations of image size (pixel and kb) should be enough to make this threat enjoyable with a low bandwith.
People should just leave a link for a higher resolution SS, if anyone really wants to see that 8k sized image they could just open the link lol.
Second item: I'm guilty. I've posted lots of PNGs. Not because I think it would be cool or special, but simply that it is the format that my screencapture software (Droplr) uses. It has an odd compression algorithm to keep the filesize at specific sizes, namely <512kb, 512kb, 1MB, 2MB and 4MB. For the screencap size that I generally take, the files are below 1MB, or exactly on 1MB... so I just thought "ah what the heck, it's within the filesize requirements" .. but now that I see that people are having difficulty, it certainly is not fair or courteous. Even though the filesize does not exceed 1MB, it is still excessive in comparison to the lower resolution and unneeded color fidelity. So in the past few months I've made it a point to use Tumblr for hosting. They generally come in at 1280 width, given the format of my site. Still I may have occasionally posted via Droplr screencap, looking for feedback here on work which I do not intend to post to Tumblr. Can't remember why I stopped using the upload feature on the forum, maybe burn from CA.org? OK, too much talk. Moral of the story is: for me it has been convenience, or call it laziness. I've not struggled with slow connections, so I hadn't realized how a little laziness had been seriously affecting members. Sorry for that!
I think the measures you have put in place (the reminder header) will be effective. You may also consider for new members suggesting hosting solutions that automatically compress images and resize (I believe tumblr resizes to 1280 width, not 100% sure though). In addition, I think it is completely acceptable for members to self-police a little to take a load off of the mods, but going back to laziness, I've never bothered to mention it when I see it. Maybe it hadn't seemed worth the time to craft a constructive response that had nothing to do with the artwork.
We're not there yet though, so for now it's just personal responsibility.
OK, sounds good. Removed the limits from that thread. If it gets really slow, let us know.
When you add an image to a post, could the forum not create a smaller 'thumbnail' that is loaded? When the image gets clicked it can load the original uploaded image at it's full res... That way lower bandwidth for general browsing but still having the necessary pixels/information that us artists have worked so hard on?
I understand this is dev time but, right now less than 500kb in 2016 is stupidly low, I would much prefer to have the old waywo threads with all their crazy .pngs as I would just let it load for a few minutes and check when it was done. I don't want to have to store 2 pictures every time I render something because other people can't load a page with 1080p images...
The limits are only on shared threads, you can link a post to your own personal thread with images of any size....
Second of all, it's inefficient to have to wait minutes for a page to load, even on the desktop, and that's why many people haven't been going to WAYWO to browse the way they used to. A lot of people are posting carelessly large images, and it's adding up.
Personally I think Polycount should be mobile considerate but not at the expense of the content. The current rules feel like things have swung too far in an effort to contain the bloat. I understand the intent but it went a little far IMO. I dont see how 2 images max with a 1200 or less width (I dont think height should be capped, if its under the data limit the height shouldnt matter) at under 1mb is excessive in this day and age.
Edit:
Even facebook allows bigger images at fullscreen.
Edit:
My point is Waywo has always been "big". We shouldnt make it something smaller, just manageable.
In spite of that 29mb png file that is actually one of the lighter loading pages in WAYWO at only 134mb for every image on the page. Compared to 175mb for page 2 which doesn't contain any 29mb "outliers".
Yet consistently on every single page, the largest images are oversized PNGs
There are many images that are smaller in size and bigger in dimension that are outside the inital 36.
Info is here: http://imgur.com/a/Q9ZSd
The huge images (file size) are outliers. I was wrong about the specific sizes though and their frquency. Thats on me. But I think my point still stands, wayo has always been big considering the year. This is not and does not to ever appear to have been a file type or dimension problem when it comes to the page loading. It appears to be a file size problem. So why arent we only capping the filzesize? I can understand wanting to keep the dimensions a bit more manageable but under 1000 pixels doesnt make sense. Also the file type shouldnt really matter so long as it hits the size limit.
Edit: It should be noted that there are more and more images lost the further back we go. So this is by no means definitive.
This is all ignoring the main issue though, I highlighted that 29mb PNG as an example of how bad it gets sometimes. If you want an average look at why these rules exist then look at the first 4 pages of WAYWO 2016 to the last 4 (since these rules have been enforced) and compare the total page sizes:
As Eric mentioned before jpg files are recompressed to strip metadata, so while I might upload a huge image that is very compressed when the server recompresses it to 80% quality it will turn out considerably larger. Sometimes jpg compression reacts differently to certain types of images too, so having a resolution upper limit at least sets some sort of baseline.
We tried a higher compression amount initially, but the image quality suffered, so we chose a lower compression amount.
Also we're using a fast image compressor, not a slow pretty one. So that affects file sizes. It's a pita to wait.
The forum display size is about 904 pixels across or so.
These factors are part of why we chose a 1000 pixel limit.
If we allowed unlimited height, then sizes would easily balloon.
Besides those limits are only for a small section of the site.
In the end though we don't have to justify any of these decisions. Use of this privately-owned forum is not a guaranteed right, for anyone. So don't get too pissy.
We aim to make it as accessible to the widest audience of artists and art-lovers possible. Because in the end we are art practitioners and lovers too, and we love to host a vibrant community of like (and unlike!) minds.
Feel free to discuss what's going on. But if you don't agree with the rules, then post your art outside the waywo's. The internet's a big enough place.
This is directly contradictory to the original purpose of these threads, they were meant as a community-update kind of thing, and still are. Not as a way for people just to self-promote their artwork.
We have nothing wrong with promotion. However Polycount is first and foremost a discussion community... wips, critiques, sharing techniques, helping each other with tech problems, creating tools, debating art issues, etc. We want to foster this as much as possible; we feel this is the heart and soul of Polycount.
When some people use the WAYWO threads only as a self-promotion vehicle, this dilutes the community, reduces the usefulness of the site. Basically, it's taking without giving.
We're kicking around some ideas, nothing definitive yet. Maybe the WAYWOs are only open to people with a certain # of posts. Or maybe a certain reputation value (though we generally detest this). Maybe they're generated from your threads, by you clicking an "add to WAYWO" button and choosing one of your embedded images. We want to encourage discussion and contribution.
How do you feel about this? We're open to ideas.
The new changes are great, and now WAYWO is far better, we're good now right?