I've been wondering why our outbound bandwidth seems to be bumping against
the limits lately, so I've been running various utilities against our web
logs.

One thing I discovered was about a gig of transfers from a single file...
somebody decided it would be neato to link to a monster graphics file one
of the games has.

Now, there's not much gamemasters can do about that sort of thing (though
if it becomes widespread, I'll put an interceptor in there that refuses to
serve graphics to offsite pages... it'll save bandwidth at the cost of
system load), but I'd like everybody to remember that we're primarily a
message server, not a web hosting service.  We've got plenty of drive
space (well, actually it's all on the new server right now) but bandwidth
is a big choke point for us here.  Link to large graphics rather than
having them automatically displayed as part of a page, put stuff offsite
if you have space elsewhere, and so on.

(I don't even need to say anything about making sure you have the rights
to publish any graphics you're using, right?)

When the time comes, we'll buy a bigger pipe, but bandwidth is expensive
in flyover country (and we'd really, really rather not colo), so we want
to put it off as long as possible.

In this case, I just took the simple step of renaming the linked-to file,
and changing the local page to point to the new name.  So
/realms/images/silverwest.jpg is now /realms/images/silverwest2.jpg.  The
Phoenyx page that points to it has been changed accordingly, so don't
stomp on those changes if you re-upload that page, MJ...

-- --------------------------------------------------------------
Game(s): The Whole Phoenyx
Listowner tools are found at http://www.phoenyx.net/listowners/