Photo size.

This is where I have been having some problems when clicking this link to see the pics.


competition.. HERE is a link to the photos to help you choose your 3..!!:wink:Users Vote Guidelines below:-
1. Competitors

 

What about other admins whilst logged out? I know that may sound rather tenous, but strange things do happen and it would only take a few minutes for other Administrators to check whether their logged in/out experiences are different from the rest of us.

 

I only get full pictures when I'm logged in, thumbnails when logged out.

 

Sorry, I am completely up to date with my various uploads and I STILL see the thumbnails as thumbnails ...

My question is this ... why do those who choose to put pictures up through GC NOT use the function below saying thumbnail or full size ? .... is that so difficult to do?

 

Being as my pictures are being used here Victoria, I would just like to say that I do use the function for full size pictures. I've said this just to eliminate that as being the problem.

 

All images in the Photo thread are full size (in the sense that sometimes images are offered at the bottom of threads as thumbnails and clicking on them then displays the full size; whereas all pictures in the Photo thread come up full size within the posts themselves, no clicking required)

What people are seeing is a medium-sized image WITHIN the post (not a thumbnail at the bottom as described above)

The reason that people see these "medium sized" images when not logged in is that full-size versions of ALL images stored on this site are ONLY available to people when they are logged in - no sense GC wasting bandwidth sending full-size version to freeloaders linking from other sites etc. So you have to be logged in to see the full size version. This applies to all posts, not just Photo thread.

If a post contains a LINK to an image, on an external site, then it will display as full size - its not GC's bandwidth that is being used so GC doesn't / can't do anything to only send a small-size version.

The photo thread contains a mixture of images uploaded here, and images held externally on photobucket etc. (Hence, when not logged in, only some of them appear "medium sized")

If you are logged in and not seeing full sized images then its a security issue with your browser - your browser is not sending the appropriate cookie to GC, when requesting the images, in order that GC can validate that you are currently logged in - so the image that is returned to you is "medium sized" because GC server thinks that, for that specific image request, you are not logged in.

I don't know whether the fault is with your browser, your PC's internet [security] settings, your ISP or something at the GC end. Could be any of them.

In the first instance I would recommend that you download and install a different brand of browser. If that works correctly then your old browser, or the settings somewhere on your PC, is bust. If both browser brands don't work them most likely the fault is at your ISP, GC or somewhere in between. If you can plug your PC in at a friends house and it all works fine then its your ISP!

 

So Jiffy & I were correct

Plus how can you call this a "medium sized" image, it's flippin tiny.


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P.S. I manually updated Java yesterday just to verify that I've got the latest update and I'm using IE7

P.P.S.

But surely that needs to be balanced against what I posted above, about potetentially new members being put off by viewing tiny pics:

So is this 'problem' a result of an overt GC anti-'leeching' (from this website) policy? (which could be acheived by other means?).

 

I used the word "medium" as its bigger than the images which are used for thumbnails on this site



I guess its intended to be big enough as a "taster" ...

They can register ... and then see them full size. Not sure that is obvious when viewing not-logged-in though? If so it would be good to have a "banner" explaining it, if possible.

Bit hard to say. When a browser displays a web page it gets the "HTML" describing how to display the page.That includes instructions to tell the browser about other elements on the page - including getting a file that defines the colours / styling for the page, any JavaScript programmatic clever stuff to provide visual effects and so on, and also every image on the page.

Some images will come from GC server, others may come from 3rd party sites.

For images that are requested from the GC server when the browser requests each image it will also send all the cookies (the GC site ones only) and may also send a "referrer" (which basically says "This image was requested from THIS page"). The referrer is definitely sufficient to deduce that the person is indeed looking at a GC page, rather than KristensBlog which happens to contain a link to a GC image However ... browsers don't always include the referrer information, so the site cannot be built using that assumption.

Personally I think that Cookies would be enough. They would tell you that the person had viewed a GC page recently - and I expect that is good enough.

But ... GC Policy might be different: "We want people to register, so lets show them medium sized pictures until they do". Lots of sites disable other features - such as SEARCH - until you register. I have no personal opinion on the Goods/Bads of any such "incentives"

Bandwidth required to serve pictures to external links is definitely significant. GC threads are full of "Here's a picture of an example" links to other sites ... those sites are "paying" for the bandwidth to deliver that image to you, even though you are not actually looking at that site. (Its nice/polite to include a Link to the site, in your post, so that they do get some visiting traffic as a result)

So ... dunno! I agree on saving cost/bandwidth for Nathan. I think where medium sized images are deliberately shown there should be a "Just register, then you can see this image bigger" banners making that fact obvious.

Why some of you are not seeing big images when obviously logged in - I dunno :(

 

I've come across several sites that don't display pics for guests, but there's always been a message explaining why. The photo comp pages must be the worst example to view not logged in/as a guest due to the complete mix of uploaded pics and link to photo hosting sites.

I have however noticed at time the extraordinary proportions of guests to members, especially in the early hours, for example:



As to why sometimes there are you + 72 guests reading the GC what's your weather like discussion completey escapes me.

 

They can't "vote" or comment unless they register ... so I'm not sure why the competition would be of any interest to non-Members? - unless they are just looking at some nice seasonal photos.

Either way, I think encouraging them to register is a good idea, so I'm all for giving them medium sized images, and a "Register to see bigger ones" alert

There is no, reliable, way of knowing how many people are viewing the site, and I think such statistics are so useless to the point of being worthless, but nonetheless all forums display them.

There is no way of knowing that you have stopped looking at GC - you've clicked off and are now looking at Bedroom Wallpaper sites instead (yeah, you can do a window lost-focus, but in practice I very much doubt that the software bothers) or if your browser is still open with GC on the screen but you've walked away to watch the telly / go to bed. (Well, there are some really complicated ways that might improve the stats, but still in Chocolate Teapot territory, so not worth the effort, and I doubt GC software has anything sophisticated as the Development cost is unlikely to have been worth it for the Forum vendors).

So best you can do is to record which "cookies" are viewing the site, and to assume that if you have not seen a "cookie" for 30 minutes that it is no longer "viewing" the site. So at best the stats will include everyone who actually went away within the last 29 minutes.

Next up is anything that doesn't honour the cookies. Every page they request will start a new session - and get a new Session Cookie. Lots of Search Engines' "spider crawlers" have that behaviour, so it would not surprise me if the Guest Count went into many hundred at some times during the day when particular Spiders are trawling the site (the sort of behaviour you saw on the Weather thread, for example - if its a long thread a search engine could get multiple different Session Cookies trawling through that one thread). Even if that is not a real problem there will, at times, be tens of spiders active concurrently, and all looking like "guests". Personally we ban all spiders on our sites except a very select few. I see no point in entertaining Spiders for search engines that no one has ever heard of which just waste our bandwidth ...

It is possible to detect spiders (well, usually, quite a lot "fake" their User Agent to look like a bog standard browser - even Microsoft used to do that ...), but keeping up to date with all the new ones that appear every month would be a herculean task, so I doubt very much that the GC Forum software bothers. It would also be possible to detect that some "users" were spiders by the fact that they only requested the "content" of the pages, and never the images, or style sheets, or somesuch ... again, not worth the bother IMHO and I doubt the GC software does any tricks like that - but it might.

So I doubt very much that the Guests statistics are worth the pixels they are written in, I'm afraid

 

I did wonder why sometimes over 100+ 'Guests' were viewing the likes of our GC's 'what's your weather like' discussion thread during the early hours of the morning, but if it's nonsense, why display it?

Another forum (not gardening) that displays prominent messages re: displaying pics in posts displays this message

Others don't enable pics to be displayed (and they are are on image hosting sites, not that forum).

I don't see any explanation here on GC whilst logged out.

 

Would be good to get that rectified, IMHO