Avatars - The Real Announcement

san00b

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Right, so the last one left a ton of questions. I jumped the gun on that announcement, thinking that Xenforo natively supports external sources for avatars.

It doesn't :D.

The Problem

On the old forums, we never allowed users to upload their own avatars due to bandwidth limitation. This time, since the option wasn't there, it was overlooked. We didn't have an issue with it until this month.

Note: Number clipped. Actual value at 42.429etc

That's was us on Monday. We were well over our bandwidth limit, and I was getting a flood of emails from our host regarding it. Tracing the issue, its caused by all the avatars we host. Avatars by themselves generated, on average, 1GB/day of traffic.

I ordered a boatload more bandwidth allocation for our website, but even after that, we're still stuck with only 8GB left for the rest of the month. More bandwidth alone isn't going to cut it.

The Fix

As of Friday/Saturday, we will be deleting all avatars hosted on our website. If you wish to keep an avatar, you will have to register an account through Gravatar. It's easy to set up, and only takes a minute.

This isn't an ideal solution, but it is needed. We'll keep looking into alternate solutions, but for the time being, this is the only option.

Avatars will be deleted ~3AM GMT, Saturday October 22nd.
 
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DieLorelei

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thats nearly 4 EB :eek:

thats crazy... If it wasnt labeled in an nice clean and tidy image posted by San00b, I wouldn't believe it...
 

silvadude12

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I'm having the same problem. I made a gravatar, uploaded it to my email, and it wont show up on the test or anything.
Also, how do i make the pic below a spoiler so it doesant break rules?
 
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DieLorelei

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I noticed the uploading is back online... Does that mean bandwidth won't be an issue any more?
 

Alkatraz

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If I understand correctly, yes people can now upload, but if you already have a working gravatar, changing to an uploaded one will just waste bandwidth which isn't good.
So there is more available bandwidth, but not unlimited.