Melody
Banned
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- Posts
- 20
- Years
- Cuddling those close to me
- Seen Mar 4, 2018
we have been looking around at various CDN services to help lighten the page load (as well as server loads) time and so far, haven't yet found an easy way to integrate it into our backend.. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it just means we're still looking.
Photobucket is NOT an option. they delete way too many images and have other unfriendly restrictions.
as for patchy's idea, the reason we don't allow image link in avatars is we can't control those sites, and malware and other bad things could seep in.. also not to mention breaking the avatar size limit thingy.
Quite frankly, like Rukario says here, a CDN is the only way we're going to get it to work. But as he says here, getting a CDN account to work is tricky.
We'd likely need to implement no small number of VB hacks to make it work. The backend isn't set up that way. Also I agree with previous posts mentioning that services like ImageShack or Photobucket would see this as a Violation of their ToS and decide to render the account useless, which would break the functionality.
My idea would be to somehow use a remotely hosted/synchronized folder, so that when you upload an avatar it's stored/uploaded onto the CDN server. Tweaks to the master template or core VB code could possibly force VB to fetch the images from the CDN server first instead and fall back to the main server if the image isn't found. Additionally, this could be implemented without a CDN, just by setting up another server and assigning it a subdomain like img.pokecommunity.com. The server would then be able to serve up nothing but avatar, signature and album images appropriately.
But the cost of another server might well be more than a CDN might charge. I dont know for sure. I do know that maybe if we did offload those images onto another server it might help bring server load down and make the DB perform better, if the forum software and the DB daemon are on the same system.