At the end of the day, it's a privately owned forum and the owner of the forum sets the rules. He who pays for the bandwidth…

However in a case like this I'm more of the opinion that a little effort be put into the forum software to automatically resize linked images on the fly to fit into the boundaries set by the page layout. Not by allowing users to enter their own hand-crafted HTML, since that'd be insane. PHP-based forum code like this is easy enough to hack anyway if you're 1337 as there's always some hole left somewhere, though you'd expect anything run by a watchmaker to have *much* more serious attention to detail ;)

That's beside the point. The point is that the software, when rendering the output page, should interpret an IMG or PIC tag (haven't tried posting a picture yet, and good job I haven't since I usually save 1024x768 for my web server and that, apparently, breaks the rules), and then either send the created HTML to the client with a 'resize' tag to gate the maximum size of any picture, or download the picture from the server, resize it in /tmp and link to that. The latter choice would be both hard on CPU and also slow things down on dead links, so probably not a wise choice.

I'm not a web coder so don't know HTML apart from random hackery but I use enough forums that do exactly this, so it can't be that hard.

I run all my own systems and any picture I post will basically have come from one of my Macs onto a Mac server, where I host them from. If I'm going to have to go though every picture I want to link to on TZ-UK and resize them, then I'm not going to bother apart from cases where the picture *is* the thread - e.g. my project watch build thread (which I haven't started here yet, because I haven't started taking photos yet).

This is both good and bad - good luck in that I haven't started taking Project pics yet (I'll size them to 800 wide for this site, it doesn't cost me much) and hopefully that'll be an interesting thread - and bad luck in the sense that I know I shouldn't link to *any* of my existing photos, e.g. wrist shots of any of my collection of watches.

I'm not going to risk getting banned over the number of pixels in a photo, and I don't have time to resize everything, so if the rules are hard and fast on this one (Eddie?) then I'll simply avoid linking to any of my existing photos. I'll create a new folder on my webserver for pics for this site - and go forward based on the 800 pixel limit.

I'd appreciate it if it was made TUNGSTEN-CORED clear that 800 will remain the limit though since I'll be basing a workflow off this. Not the biggest deal but I'd appreciate it.

I'm not too bothered since I'm running a load of Apple kit with 2560x1600, 1920x1200, 1280x1024 twice and 1280x800 displays, but equally I like my forum browser windows not taking up the entire screen - so I probably size the average browser window to 1280x1024 in reality.


Eddie - are you running the forum code or do you have a techie doing it for you? Sorry to be naive but I'm new here. If you've got a techie doing it for you then presumably he or she is skilled in PHP, and I'm pretty sure your PHPbb software supports the auto-resizing process I'm talking about above...