[Gaussian]

One of the strengths of forums is that they can also serve as one big knowledge base.
I?ve been browsing through some old posts and wasn?t surprised to see several interesting threads in which many people commented on an image or discussed a problem that was related to it, yet? the image was gone because it was originally posted on a third party server that stopped to exist.
At such a point threads like these that have great potential to help any member who is dealing with related issues become totally useless.

I want to avoid this and I can sadly only do this by introducing a rule which will be in affect after one week (so that people can get used to it):

It?s now not allowed (with exceptions) to link to images that are not on our server. This includes links using URL or IMG tags.

This also includes images of your artwork, even when it means that it will slightly affect its quality by showing it at a lower resolution. Do understand that PSG was never built on egos, PSG is built on the community spirit and in my view the community doesn?t want to see very long detailed threads that are extremely interesting, related to an image that is?uh? missing.


Under certain circumstances I will not be very strict:

A - Images that are an embedded part of tips/techniques/tutorials

B - Someone might want to start a challenge and has an image that should be used in the challenge, yet the image is too big to post as an attachment, so he/she provides a link instead.

C ? Someone wants to know how an image was done and posts a link instead of an attachment to respect copyrights.

D ? Several other situations I can?t think of.

Note that under some of those circumstances I will move the images involved to the PSG server and adjust the links manually.

A person who wants to update an image can post a new link, after which I will move the updated image to the server.

A person who wants to remove an image that is hosted on the server, can remove the link to the image and if needed contact me to delete the original.

I hope that you all understand that I do this for the sake of the community, even if it means that more space will be used on the server and more manual changes need to be done. Sadly some people will not be happy with the chance, but again understand that it's sometimes a struggle to balance the positive with the negative sides of descisions like these.

In return I have decided to make 3 changes:

- the max width of attachments on this forum is increased to 700 pixels
- the max file size of a single attachment is increased to 100kb
- the max number of attachments is increased to 3


My only request is; if you don?t really need the full 700 pixels, then please don?t, because it will make the board faster if images are kept small and it avoids that I have to prune the board, which often means getting rid of very old posts (which I want to avoid).

Thank you for your understanding.