About the one line messages.. or one word replies.. I'm hesitant to ask folks to write more/less than they already do. Sometimes the one liners are words of encouragement, and that's helpful to others in the community. For example, if someone does something cool with their Segway (a nice interview.. some neat new accessory they came up with) and someone wants to say "Way to go!" or "Nice job!" - I think that's fine. I'm sure there are some who disagree, but we've been around for more than a year now and I've never heard that criticism about that type of posting.
About the photographs, I recently added some "code" to the forum which automatically resizes the images down to 200 pixels wide (height auto adjust accordingly.) To view the full size image, you just need to click on the photo.
I'm conscious of the fact that many members have slower dialup connections. I try to optimize the site so the load time is minimal. Since the photos do add to the load time, you might try browsing with images turned off. You have the ability to do this through your Internet Settings in your browser. This will dramatically improve the load time of web pages in general. I know that's not a long term solution..
What I've thought about doing is giving members the option of "turning images off" in their profiles when they visit SegwayChat only. This way, only little placeholders will load in place of images. If you want, you can click the placeholders and see the intended image. As I have more time, I'll begin to develop that solution.
Basically I feel that more people are moving towards broadband/high speed connections. Like PC technology moves forward as software demands increase (new features - more graphic intensive - people buy new PCs.. they upgrade), I believe the Internet should move forward and *require* faster connections. That's not to say one shouldn't work to optimize their existing software/applications (as I constantly do with SegwayChat) but there is a point where I'd like to move forward and see more media.. more graphics.. a more robust, informative, entertaining and multimedia rich online experience.
As an aside, if someone uses the "same photo" in their sig, you aren't necessarily downloading it every time you read a thread where that sigs pops up again. Browsers these days are smart and can cache frequently used/accessed images and stuff. In that way, no more bandwidth is being used once you download that photo for the first time. If you browser isn't doing that, perhaps I can help you figure out how to enable that setting.
Regards,
Frank A. Tropea
Admin - "Keep your wheels on the ground!" -
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