Why the site was down....

[tjudy]

Th reason the site was dead for the last few days of March was because we surpassed the bandwidth limit. Based upon usage rates per day, the biggest problem was most likely 'bots' accessing the image files on the profile. I can look at the logs of who was accessing the pages (big brother IS watching... a little). Certain IP addresses are used by these automated programs, and the largest image loading usage in March was about 80% by those bots. By turning off the profiles we should be able to prevent the site from going down again in April.

This is the big reason we do not allow iamges to be loaded directly onto the forum. By hosting images outside the program we avoid the bandwidth usage of loading the image. The system the profiles are built with does not host the image elsewhere, so it became a problem. It is possible to host the images for the profiles off site, but that woudl mean redoing the profiles again... which I do nto have the time to do (now that i am workign full time again). Maybe when school lets out for the Summer....

 

[Mike Wise]

I'm just happy that it's up again. I was getting withdrawl symptoms!

 

[DH247]

That makes 2 of us! Is it bad when you visit repeatedly throughout the day??? To the point I actually set it up as my homepage I think I'm addicted!

Hey Mike... quick question for ya. Are there any places on the net that would be good for finding information regarding newly described/found apisto species? Thanks

 

[Mike Wise]

I think that this forum is probably best location for information on new apistos.

Another option (one that I check at least once each week) is:
http://www.worldfish.de/sci.htm. It is a source of new descriptions for all fish.

Tom Christoffersen (http://apisto.sites.no/default.aspx) also keeps such information on his web site.

Both of the above are European sites - the first German, the second Norwegian, but both are in English.

 

[georgedv]

Question about loading pictures.

Although I save my pictures on other sites (like photobucket) and then link them to this site, they still appear on the post....does that mean the pics are on this site and use up bandwidth?

If so, please tell us how to properly link the pic so as not to use bandwidth.

thanks

g

 

[tjudy]

If the images are hosted off the forum in a place like PhotoBucket they will not affect our bandwidth.... or so I have been led to beleive. The way I understand it is that the origin of the flow of data for those images is not apistogramma.com, even though it appears on the forum screen. So you do not need to reduce image file-size to post in the forum. If you want to reduce the file size of images that you put on the net, which a a good idea for many reasons, you can use PhotoShop or any other image editor to do that. When you save the image you are usually given an option to change image quality. I save a copy at level 3 if the image is destined for the web, and another at level 12 (the highest in PhotoShop) for printable images. You can also do it to all the images in a file at once using the scripts tool.

 

[DH247]

Thanks Mike! Yeah this site has been an amazing resource. I am very thankful that Ted does such a great job keeping it up and running!