Hosting guidelines

[berlyda]

To keep things running smoothly on the new forum and help prevent it from going down like the old one did, we're going to be introducing some guidelines for hosting. Since contests are a big part of this forum, they also take up a lot of bandwidth. Following these tips will help minimise the server load.

• Hosts sometimes use PNG images, which have a noticeably larger file size than JPG. While PNG brings good image quality, it can also hurt bandwidth.
• Please consider the size of the image. The old forum automatically resized images so they didn't appear that big, but the bigger image also means bigger file size. Please try to save the image at the exact size you would like it to appear on the forum.
• Please use outside image hosting sites, do not upload images to the forum.
• Try compressing images without losing any quality. For example, Photoshop has the option to save images for web where you can choose the quality of 60 (out of 100), have smaller file size and not lose any quality. But there are also compressors like https://imageoptim.com/mac or https://tinyjpg.com/ or https://compressor.io/ which can compress images as well.

We appreciate your cooperation with this. These may seem like minor things, but they can make a significant difference to server load.

 

[theditz83]

I was just speaking to AshleyWright about this the other night before I posted the WV spin off show as I'd seen Jukica's original post and didn't want the banners to be too big.

The issue I have is that because I almost exclusively post to the forum using my phone browser, images are always resized and I don't get a true idea of what the optimal image size for show images is. So what width/height in pixels do you guys tend to go for? I think probably 640 width is probably optimal, but sometimes you need a bit more detail.

So I guess I'm wondering how big is too big?

 

[berlyda]

The most common computer screen resolution is 1366x768 pixels, so I'd agree that roughly half of that is a good figure to go for (somewhere around 640x320). You could go a bit higher than that, but as an absolute maximum I would say 960x480. Any higher than that and the banner will definitely not fit on the screen without being resized.

 

[Stargazer]

I often use an 800 pixel width for scoreboards, which is a good decent size. Not too small, but not too big either.

 

[theditz83]

Seems that the image hosting site I used (imgbb.com) resized the banner images to 640 width anyway, so that's pretty handy