[iceman (Mike)]

Hi guys.

Just want to re-iterate the image posting guidelines, because there's a lot of new members lately and perhaps not all of them have read the guidelines. Also there's been quite a few images posted that are well above the 60k limit so it's a timely reminder.

There are 2 reasons why the 800x600 60k limit needs to be followed and enforced:

1. Dialup users - we have many. Not everyone can afford broadband, or has access to broadband. We still have a lot of dialup users and we need to be considerate of how long it takes for the pages to load for them.

2. Database size! The forum database is growing at a massive rate, and a large percentage of the size of the database is due to the attachments table. Size growth due to more members and more posts is fine, but if everyone starts posting 150k images it's going to get out of hand and the database backups will take longer and use more bandwidth!

3. Aesthetics. The 800x600 limit is mainly due to aesthetic reasons, to avoid the thread getting horizontal scroll bars and making posts hard to read. Of course it's also to help keep the file size down.

So, to re-iterate the rules:

Please keep attached images to 800x600 60k or under.

If you want to show a higher resolution, less compressed version, please upload it to your own webspace (or other freely available photo site webspace) and provide a link to it.

To check your image size, in windows explorer, right-click on the image and go down to "properties". You'll see the size (in bytes) and the resolution. Anything over 60000 bytes and 800x600 will exceed the limits.

To resize them (both in resolution and file size), use a program like "irfanview" (fast & free). You can resize the image to under 800x600 and save it as a compressed jpeg to get it under 60k file size.

Thanks for your co-operation in this, and i'm happy to hear any constructive comments or suggestions.