The LNER Encyclopedia

Richard,

In the LNER Photographs area you recently wrote:

richard wrote:Note that all attachments take up space on MY web server and will cost ME. Although my web server account hosts a number of commercial sites, the LNER forums now take up the bulk of my allocation. 500K might not seem much but these attachments add up.

Andy York over on RMWeb implements a number of housekeeping rules according to the Forum area. For example Classifieds and general stuff are deleted after a relatively short period of time; on here Classifieds contains 141 topics dating back to September 2005 whilst General Chat contains 175 topics dating back to January 2006.

Whilst news of new publications is informative, photos of all the front covers and especially those of non-LNER subject matter must consume a lot of valuable space too. In general a link can be made to details of the book on the publisher's website.

Just a thought...

Thanks for the suggestion. Yes Simon spoke to me before posting. The images are very small and limited in size.

The text is not an issue. And even a few small images are not that much of an issue. It is the larger images that add up quickly though. 6x 500K images a day for a year adds up to a gigabyte. Ideally the forum software would allow these images to be uploaded to AmasonS3 (where I have an account and all the static images are already stored) - then the limits and costs/potential costs would be much more manageable.


Richard

One thought is that I could delete all Classifieds threads that haven't had any activity in the last 2 years.
As with unactivated users, I could do this every so often (say 6-12 months) when I'm cleaning up.

Other folders have stuff of use (eg. recollections, questions, etc) that may be of use to people in the future. This is generally not true for stuff that is for sale.

Richard

That seems reasonable to me. I actually pm'ed Richard yesterday just before seeing this thread, suggesting he delete a couple of my classified entries which have been sold.

As far as the new books thread goes, I wondered about the cover pictures, but thought it would help people identify individual titles. I usually scan the front cover and as it's not a historical picture of interest for its details, reduce the memory down to approx 100-200MB for posting on here. I don't post every new book we get (or even a quarter of them!) and I try to give preference to LNER subjects and titles which come from smaller publishers - not all of whom have web-sites anyway. Wild Swan is a well known example of even a larger publisher without an official web presence.

One of these days the Embsay bookshop may have its own site again, I could then provide titles and brief descriptions with a link - if and when it happens, so long as it doesn't count as commercial advertising, I'll probably do that.

I think you meant KB rather than MB! I think you can reduce them further - perhaps in resolution a little bit more (you can see some of the effects of high JPG compression beginning to appear, so I suspect a lot more JPG compression will result in much poorer pictures).

Richard