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Difficult Picture upload... again

Suggjestion Type
  1. Forum Software
Susquatch

Susquatch

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Premium Member
buckbrush said:
Sir, your pictures will not expand for me.
Click to expand...

This is an ongoing challenge for many members. The images system has been messed up for quite some time on the forum with no sign of hope for the future.

The best way to improve the situation. Is for the poster to select thumbnail when uploading a photo.

Screenshot_20250630_102705_Chrome~2.jpg
 
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Susquatch said:
This is an ongoing challenge for many members. The images system has been messed up for quite some time on the forum with no sign of hope for the future.

The best way to improve the situation. Is for the poster to select thumbnail when uploading a photo.

View attachment 66599
Click to expand...
Is this forum self hosted or provided by a third party? I'm wondering if it's a software issue or config/setup related. I see it's a payfor platform so if it's a bug, they should fix it. :)
 
J.mac said:
Is this forum self hosted or provided by a third party? I'm wondering if it's a software issue or config/setup related. I see it's a payfor platform so if it's a bug, they should fix it. :)
Click to expand...


It's a VERY LONG Story. Here is the short version. Several of us maintain websites and other forums. The difference is that they are all either small or require membership fees. This is the only free forum of its size that I know of. Our only source of revenue is premium memberships and a little bit of Amazon patronage. We do not want to Ram advertising down our member's throats and therefore don't generate advertising revenue.

We started as a small forum supporting a small Calgary user base. We purchased a self hosted license for Xenforo. We used to self host on a private company server that donated space to us. That company's other client server needs grew rapidly and soon overpowered our own needs and rightfully prioritized other paying needs. The server crashed a while back and a decision was made to buy a hosting service instead and move us off of a donated service to a paid hosting service self funded by premium memberships. We restored a backup to the new hosting company. But they DID NOT LIKE how big our image storage was cuz it took up too much space on their server. They bought and installed an add-on to compress the images and it all went to hell from there. They kept dragging their feet saying they would fix it, but never did. We have resigned ourselves to the fact that they never will. We are trying to develop alternatives but fundamentally we think hosting on the Xenforo Software Servers is a better all around solution. Unfortunately, that costs money we don't have right now.

In summary, it's not a Xenforo bug. It's a server support problem and perhaps a server expertise problem. We are living with it until we can develop a satisfactory affordable alternative.

For now, the best solution we have been able to develop is to use the display as thumbnail option. It seems to be the most reliable.
 
Susquatch said:
It's a VERY LONG Story. Here is the short version. Several of us maintain websites and other forums. The difference is that they are all either small or require membership fees. This is the only free forum of its size that I know of. Our only source of revenue is premium memberships and a little bit of Amazon patronage. We do not want to Ram advertising down our member's throats and therefore don't generate advertising revenue.

We started as a small forum supporting a small Calgary user base. We purchased a self hosted license for Xenforo. We used to self host on a private company server that donated space to us. That company's other client server needs grew rapidly and soon overpowered our own needs and rightfully prioritized other paying needs. The server crashed a while back and a decision was made to buy a hosting service instead and move us off of a donated service to a paid hosting service self funded by premium memberships. We restored a backup to the new hosting company. But they DID NOT LIKE how big our image storage was cuz it took up too much space on their server. They bought and installed an add-on to compress the images and it all went to hell from there. They kept dragging their feet saying they would fix it, but never did. We have resigned ourselves to the fact that they never will. We are trying to develop alternatives but fundamentally we think hosting on the Xenforo Software Servers is a better all around solution. Unfortunately, that costs money we don't have right now.

In summary, it's not a Xenforo bug. It's a server support problem and perhaps a server expertise problem. We are living with it until we can develop a satisfactory affordable alternative.

For now, the best solution we have been able to develop is to use the display as thumbnail option. It seems to be the most reliable.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the info. I'd love to help, but it doesn't sound like something I could assist in solving, short of a membership I guess :)

If you want to share some storage and transfer stats over pm, I can see if there's anything I might be able to suggest or help with. I did have a look at what the network panel shows on images that don't load and it appears it's related to http2 response errors, but only in chrome. Which points to a misconfigured response header coming back, likely due to whatever they added to compress the images.
 
Susquatch said:
It's a VERY LONG Story. Here is the short version.
Click to expand...
Susq - This totally deserves a separate post to inform members.
I am a premium member since I first joined 3 years ago. Really guys - it is only $5 a month to support this forum. It is completely an optional donation but the best 5 bucks i ever spent. The info and help i have received has been amazing.
Come on guys pony up and keep this forum one of the best in North America

Craig
 
Our biggest PITA issue IMO. Is there a way to provide immediate feedback to a user when they attempt a picture upload which appears to load OK based on thumbnail, but inevitably leads to the dreaded 'unable to display' for the next 1000 people who click the image & trip on the same problem over & over again? Like if the issue is file size, a popup message comes up & immediately says 'sorry maximum image size = X MB' & poster knows he has to reduce it on his end. Or if our web app is fussy about file extension type, same idea. I'm not sure where the display incompatibility lays, I know our tech gurus have looked into this, but have we exhausted all tools that puts the onus/tangible feedback back on the poster?

1751647347013.png
 
Susquatch said:
It's a VERY LONG Story. Here is the short version. Several of us maintain websites and other forums. The difference is that they are all either small or require membership fees. This is the only free forum of its size that I know of. Our only source of revenue is premium memberships and a little bit of Amazon patronage. We do not want to Ram advertising down our member's throats and therefore don't generate advertising revenue.

We started as a small forum supporting a small Calgary user base. We purchased a self hosted license for Xenforo. We used to self host on a private company server that donated space to us. That company's other client server needs grew rapidly and soon overpowered our own needs and rightfully prioritized other paying needs. The server crashed a while back and a decision was made to buy a hosting service instead and move us off of a donated service to a paid hosting service self funded by premium memberships. We restored a backup to the new hosting company. But they DID NOT LIKE how big our image storage was cuz it took up too much space on their server. They bought and installed an add-on to compress the images and it all went to hell from there. They kept dragging their feet saying they would fix it, but never did. We have resigned ourselves to the fact that they never will. We are trying to develop alternatives but fundamentally we think hosting on the Xenforo Software Servers is a better all around solution. Unfortunately, that costs money we don't have right now.

In summary, it's not a Xenforo bug. It's a server support problem and perhaps a server expertise problem. We are living with it until we can develop a satisfactory affordable alternative.

For now, the best solution we have been able to develop is to use the display as thumbnail option. It seems to be the most reliable.
Click to expand...
Following up on this with a thought. Susq / David have you tried turning off all caching on the server? Maybe you already ran down that path already sorry if it is a FAQ.

https://canadianhobbymetalworkers.com/attachments/20181206_191233-jpg.66779/

So is this link broken for everyone? Or is it inconsistent and works for some people and not others?

I tried opening the above image on my mac, safari, in a new window, and found I get a few lines of the top of the image but not the whole image. It then errors with a lost network connection.

Then I tried the same URL on my phone but only used the telecom network and turned off my wifi. It very slowly loaded the picture until nearly the end and then also failed with an error network connection lost. Screenshot below.


1751647437235.png
 
Susquatch said:
$100 US a month for the standard package.

If we exceed the limits, that goes to $250 US per month.
Click to expand...
So assuming it's $250USD/month we need 68 paying members.

Right now, Friday morning, 16 members are browsing and we have 266 guests. How many of those guests are 'bots' web crawlers and the like? Do we have too much load and it's more than our server allotment can handle?

Total: 282 (members: 16, guests: 266)
 
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We've done a fair bit of investigation on this issue with pretty much zero success.
I have experienced issue in the past but have not recently. I had no issues with viewing the image in that post PeterT.
 
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