Notice Max File Upload Size increased & other tweaks

I've increased the maximum file upload size, this should allow direct uploading of attachments via mobile. It's high enough that I don't think it will be a problem for any smartphone.

I've also increased the max dimensions & size for pics uploaded to the Media Center, I had these set pretty low initially and hadn't gone back and tweaked them.

All registered users can now upload attachments as large as 10MB directly to posts. I'm going to install a script that automatically re-sizes these so that they don't take up that much space on the server, but you won't be restricted on size when you upload.

For the Media Center, I removed the max photo dims limit for all users for now, 5MB max file size for Registered Users and 10MB for Paid Members.

I've also tweaked a few server settings that should speed up the site in general...hopefully, it will be noticeable to those of us who use it a lot

 

Here's the details on how this works:

You can upload a pic as an attachment up to 10MB in file size.

I also increased the number of attachments per post from 10 to 20.

However, 10MB is also the upper limit of the allowable size for an individual post - which is the sum total of all attachments + text. So you can't upload 3x 5MB pics on a single post, because that's 15MB = over the post limit. But, most smartphone pics are in the 1.6-3.0 MB range, so you should be able to upload several pics per post, no problem.

If you upload to the Media Center or another service like Photobucket, Dropbox, Shutterfly, etc and then paste the IMG code links, these count toward the number of allowable images per post, even though they don't take up any server space (though they are downloaded into an image proxy system for faster loading)

 

Increasing the max upload files size resulted in a jump in disk space usage. Not like we were going to run out soon, but it could eventually come up a few years down the road (and it makes backups huge). More importantly it makes some picture-heavy pages load REALLY slow, so:

I installed a server-side extension that allows for Xenforo to perform automatic resizing of images upon upload.

Now, photos attachments to posts or messages will automatically be resized to maximum dimensions of 1200x1200. This takes a 1.3MB pic and scales it down to roughly 130K (90% reduction = 10x faster loading)

I also ran a script that resized all the existing image attachments that were super huge down to a max of 1024x768. This was before I decided on 1200x1200 but it's not noticeable.

For the Media Gallery, larger images are allowed: in this case, 2000 x 2000. Any uploaded image larger than these dims will be automatically resized.

There is also a compression addon that will reduce the file size without reducing the dimensions, I'll think about that one though since it's not free and not really necessary.