We made an update to the threads that appear on the homepage last night. The way the images are being severed has changed, which for most users won't have any affect. The change only affects members that have been using animated gifs for their images.
Normal threads (non paid threads) - Gifs are automatically converted to jpg. They will no longer animate.
Paid Threads - Custom images will be converted to jpg. The first image in your thread will not be converted to jpg.
This means the only way to get a animated gif it to purchase a paid homepage thread, then make the first image in your thread the animated gif, so you'll have to host the image yourself.
The reason we're not allowing custom gif images for paid ads is because the images use too much bandwidth and can cause site slowness. Most of the animated gifs are 2-8mb in size. The homepage is loaded about 8k per day, so one 5mb gif would create 40Gb of bandwidth in one day, 1.2TB in a month. This is one image. If we hosted 5-10 images of this size then you can see how it can easily get out of control. The fact so much bandwidth is being used to load only a few images also creates an issue overall with site loading speed.
While both are minor issues overall, their is no benefit to hosting these gifs. If we can improve site performance without affecting too many members, we will do so. In this case only a handful of members are affected and only affected slightly so the benefits outway the bad.
New image settings:
There are 2 ways for images to appear in your homepage thread.
There are 2 ways for images to appear in your homepage thread.
[*=1]The first image in your thread is used
[*=1]For paid homepage ads, you can send me a custom image you want to use.
Normal threads (non paid threads) - Gifs are automatically converted to jpg. They will no longer animate.
Paid Threads - Custom images will be converted to jpg. The first image in your thread will not be converted to jpg.
This means the only way to get a animated gif it to purchase a paid homepage thread, then make the first image in your thread the animated gif, so you'll have to host the image yourself.
The reason we're not allowing custom gif images for paid ads is because the images use too much bandwidth and can cause site slowness. Most of the animated gifs are 2-8mb in size. The homepage is loaded about 8k per day, so one 5mb gif would create 40Gb of bandwidth in one day, 1.2TB in a month. This is one image. If we hosted 5-10 images of this size then you can see how it can easily get out of control. The fact so much bandwidth is being used to load only a few images also creates an issue overall with site loading speed.
While both are minor issues overall, their is no benefit to hosting these gifs. If we can improve site performance without affecting too many members, we will do so. In this case only a handful of members are affected and only affected slightly so the benefits outway the bad.
