Tue Aug 30, 2005 6:41 pm
Large images
First some background: I'm not a very vocal forum member, but I have been reading the FL editing forums for quite a while. Almost every query I have had with modding FL has been there, and the rest I probably were there but I just couldn't find (bring back forum search! 
).
However, having just spent the summer in rural France with only a ~33Kbps pay-per-minute dial-up connection, the amount of large (often not very useful) images in many of the incredibly useful stickied topics in many of the editing forums really got to me. I know that this isn't technically a site issue, but it's certainly not an FL editing issue.
Many of the images in info/tutorial threads are either unnecessary, illegible
or poorly compressed (I got this down to half the size in less than 10 seconds). Additionally, the forums apparently don’t give you any way to add alt text, which makes it really hard to tell which images are useful and which aren’t whilst you’re waiting all day for them to load. Although I don’t propose any one person goes through every post and edits the images, it’d be really nice if some high-and-mighty entity laid down some guidelines and maybe a basic how-to on image compression (GIF/PNG rather than JPG for screenshots etc).
The only other suggestion I could make is to take some of the older tutorials and to re-cast them into static pages rather than leaving them in the difficult to search, difficult to link to forum. It would make it much easier for people to find things, or to point them to the right place when they ask, not to mention reducing server load.
Before anyone takes offence, I’d like to say that I really appreciate all the work that has gone in to creating these resources.
).
However, having just spent the summer in rural France with only a ~33Kbps pay-per-minute dial-up connection, the amount of large (often not very useful) images in many of the incredibly useful stickied topics in many of the editing forums really got to me. I know that this isn't technically a site issue, but it's certainly not an FL editing issue.
Many of the images in info/tutorial threads are either unnecessary, illegible
or poorly compressed (I got this down to half the size in less than 10 seconds). Additionally, the forums apparently don’t give you any way to add alt text, which makes it really hard to tell which images are useful and which aren’t whilst you’re waiting all day for them to load. Although I don’t propose any one person goes through every post and edits the images, it’d be really nice if some high-and-mighty entity laid down some guidelines and maybe a basic how-to on image compression (GIF/PNG rather than JPG for screenshots etc).
The only other suggestion I could make is to take some of the older tutorials and to re-cast them into static pages rather than leaving them in the difficult to search, difficult to link to forum. It would make it much easier for people to find things, or to point them to the right place when they ask, not to mention reducing server load.
Before anyone takes offence, I’d like to say that I really appreciate all the work that has gone in to creating these resources.