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Hello designers 😁

nanootje

nanootje

Member
Joined
28 Oct 2022
Messages
34
Location
Nederland
I am nanootje....and 10 years ago i was also having aquariums.... special nano and one 150x50x50 open tank.
This open tank is still on YouTube.... don't mind the bad quality...and no plants inside. But i loved this scape.



Was admin on forum amazoona.be....and i still miss this forum. Photobucket killed it with his new payments policy instead of free.
But hey.... nowadays i needed a hobby, and picking up my aquscaping love right up this week.
Ordered a new tank and everything what's needed to start up again.
And happy and enjoying that you boys and girls are still hanging out here.....in the past i looked here also😁😁😁

So, that's me for now.
And having some questions.... shoot....
Greetings from Holland, Rob.
 
nanootje said:
Photobucket killed it with his new payments policy instead of free.
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I know the feeling, I had to quickly find a solution to make sure it did not affect this forum, by adding something that converts all linked images to attachments hosted on UKAPS, still run it to this day to ensure if images are deleted on hosting sites it doesn't affect the forum ;)
This comes at a cost though as it means that we need forever more and more space to keep the forum running and more spaces means more monthly costs!

Welcome to UKAPS :)
 
nanootje said:
Great job, you could be proud of it keeping this forum alive👍
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Indeed, :) sadly a lot of fishkeeping forums have disappeared over the last few years, while we have funds to keep it going we will do our best to maintain this alive for all to enjoy :)
 
LondonDragon said:
This comes at a cost though as it means that we need forever more and more space to keep the forum running and more spaces means more monthly costs!
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Hi @LondonDragon , On that note, I've noticed some postings include images of exorbitant resolution / size - not that it is necessarily a bad thing all the time, especially if we are trying to "diagnose" a problem, but I suggest that it may be reasonable to limit resolution vs. file size a bit (I.e. by downscaling and/or recompress with a higher loss ratio on your end). What file format are you using on the backend for hosting if I may ask or is it just whatever members upload? Feel free to PM me if you want to discuss this completely OT and hobby-unrelated topic further.

Cheers,
Michael
 
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Myrtle said:
Until recently, I thought that the rise of Facebook was to blame for the demise of forums.
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It is in an away, as people just want instant gratification rather than search for the answers, most people will find out the information they need just searching on UKAPS. But as we all seen over the last year or so FB is on downward spiral and lots of people moving away from it, to be honest I avoid the platform.
 
Myrtle said:
Welcome! Until recently, I thought that the rise of Facebook was to blame for the demise of forums. It's even sadder that it's the profiteering of image hosting sites that's to blame.
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Thank you 😃

Yes, indeed in that time Facebook came up.
The attitude of the new members changed....less conversation and more "showing off".
But without pictures and videos, there is not much to talk about on the forum....all pictures where "blocked".
 
For the main norwegian freshwater forum, facebook was definitely the main contributor to lack of forum activity. I remember when it happened, more and more activity was happening in facebook groups, but the in-depth discussions were lacking on facebook. And the search function there is barely workable.
I would say it lead to a general decline in knowledge about fish and the hobby, because the information became very superficial and repetitive.
Now people are trying to bring the forum back to life, but im not sure if it will work.
Once people have found other places to hang out (like international forums) or find facebook to be an acceptable substitute, the motivations to bring a "dead" forum back to life are lacking and a difficult job to pull off without some sort of mass event/change in the user base.

I think they hosted the pictures on the forum itself, so they were not so affected by the monetization of photo storage sites.
But I see how it has affected many other forums, and sadly irreparably damaged very valuable forum threads because of missing pictures.

(Edit): I definitely felt guilty when I read @MichaelJ 's post about picture sizes, I have sometimes been too tired to properly crop and resize pictures, and just thrown them up full size to get a post finished. But as he has rightly pointed out we have a responsibility to keep the forum from ballooning in size beyond where we can support it.
I will do better from now on!
 
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MichaelJ said:
What file format are you using on the backend for hosting if I may ask or is it just whatever members upload?
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I have been testing a script that if images are above X pixels resize to X pixels! Haven't had much time lately to work on that, but that is coming ;) I just want to make it easier for people to upload stuff as most won't have a clue how to resize a photo.
 
I feel like it’s a bit quieter on here now too? Instagram seems to be the new cool. As you say, photos are very important.

You could resize on upload, it’s quite easy to implement?

Storage is cheap, it’s the cost of serving the images back which is expensive 🤷‍♂️

As for Facebook, it was the final straw in a lot of forums I used to be on. But still, the very niche topics I follow are still on bulletin boards!
 
LondonDragon said:
I have been testing a script that if images are above X pixels resize to X pixels! Haven't had much time lately to work on that, but that is coming I just want to make it easier for people to upload stuff as most won't have a clue how to resize a photo.
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Hi @LondonDragon, The downsizing bit is only part of the solution. A typical Full Tank Shot JPEG say 2000 x 1000 that I downloaded from @Hufsa's journal :wave: was 2.1 MB (which is a reasonable resolution especially when viewed on a large desktop screen - I'm on an iMac 27" for instance). I re-saved it using medium quality compression - which yields a smaller file size (at the same resolution) at the expense of some loss of visual quality. The file went from 2.1 MB to 450 KB - thats almost 1/5th of the storage and bandwidth requirements for that particular picture with hardly any loss of visual quality. At the same (original) compression ratio, you would have to downsize the same picture to around 900 x 450 to reach the same storage/bandwidth saving, which would be a perceptually much worse result. Of course, there is no way we can even remotely expect members to take compression ratio into account when they upload files so that will have to be dealt with on the backend. I suspect whatever tool you're using for resizing will also allow you to specify the compression ratio for the newly resized file.

Cheers,
Michael
 
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UKAPS analytics are looking very healthy and consistently so, and its membership continues to grow. And I think it will endure whatever social media platform happens to be fashionable, for many reasons.

But mainly because it's a unique community of like minded individuals who together create a friendly environment in which to explore the many different avenues of this wonderful hobby of ours.

And that includes all our members, and our team of mods, experts and sponsors, who so freely give of their time and are so willing to share a wealth of knowledge and experience. And especially thanks to the hard work Paulo @LondonDragon continues to do to keep the forum updated and relevant.
 
MichaelJ said:
The downsizing bit is only part of the solution
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What I am working on also reduces the size of the images in MB, so we will see how it works, see if I can save more space so we won't have to increase disk size any time soon! We still have some room to manoeuvre for now ;)

@nanootje you opened up a can of worms and taking over your welcome thread :)
 
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