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[GT6MK3]

Traditionally, sites like Sideways don't like to host their own images. Like most sites, posters here have always been encouraged to host their pictures elsewhere, and link images from there. It saves on disk space and bandwidth, and most sites like to do that.

Sideways isn't like most sites. While we do it in a relaxed and (usually) friendly way, in between the chat and fun, this site has a wealth of technical information freely shared, and well worth preserving.

The downside of sites encouraging users to link in images from elsewhere is evident all over the net when you go searching for information, and read older threads. All too often, the linked pictures are missing, because free hosting account have closed through attrition, lack of use, or site closure.

One of the main reasons we moved hosts is to combat this problem. Our new hosting plan (thanks to our supporting members) has more than sufficient bandwidth and disk space to host all the images we use ourselves. Our new software automatically re-sizes and compresses what we save and send out.

Since we made the move I've been keeping the settings pretty conservative, and watching our traffic and storage spec to make sure all was well to make this change, and I'm confident that we have the plan right, and can handle the traffic. Until now, one of those conservative moves was to only show thumbnails of uploaded files within posts.

So two things have changes.

One is a display type change. I've flicked the switch in the new version of the software so that we no longer simply see thumbnails of uploaded images in posts. From here on, when you insert an uploaded image into a post, the image will display directly in the thread. No more clicking on thumbnails to see detail.

The other is a change in philosophy. I'm unpinned Jony's excellent post on how to include pictures by uploading them elsewhere.

From now on, here at Sideways, you're encouraged to upload and embed pictures, charts, and images.

We have the storage space, we have the bandwidth. Let's be the archive too.

Have at it.

Craig