First off, I just wanted to tell everyone "thanks" for visiting this site so much. It has really WAAY surpassed my expectations as far as popularity goes. I had envisioned a site dedicated only to Airsoft in this state, but as it turns out, a vast majority of our visitors (lurkers) are from outside of AZ. As such, we get a LOT of visitors, hits and sessions. Last month, AA used over 13,000 MB (13GB) of bandwidth! That's a HUGE amount - especially for a site like this. With increasing popularity, this will happen, but there is also something else occuring that contributes to the dramatic bandwidth usage: bandwidth "theft". This is when someone sees an image, picture, video or logo (or anything other than a URL/address) on a web site and links directly to it from somewhere outside that web site. For example... say Bob sees a picture of him in one of the AA games pictures. He then wants to show everyone on the forum he frequents called "AirsoftZone.com" and then copies the URL to the picture and puts it in a forum post on that site with something like
{img}http://www.airsoftarizona.com/link/to/image.jpg{/img}
which then appears like this:
so that when people view the post he made, it pulls up a picture that's hosted on this site. The problem is that everyone who reads the forum on that site is then pulling the picture from this site. If the picture is 250k, for every 4 people that view the post on the other site, that's 1MB of bandwith that they use - bandwith that AirsoftArizona pays for, not the other web site. As such, I have been forced to temporarily upgrade the account this server runs on to accomodate for the extra bandwidth used, but I would like to ask for everyone's help in trying to curb this type of abuse. If you see another site that has linked pictures (directly linked - where the actual picture shows up - not just a http hyperlink) please advise me so I can ask them to remove it. Hyperlinks are fine, since only those who actually WANT to see the content will click on it, rather than eveyone who simply opens a page or forum or topic. EG, if you want to post a picture, just link to it by using a URL (like this:
http://www.airsoftarizona.com/game_pics ... nSquad.jpg ) rather than use the html "img src" or "img" forum tags to post the actual picture.
Also - and this is no one's fault but my own - I allow everyone to upload a pictures to the AA web site forums. When the pictures are uploaded to the AA server, they are hotlinked rather than displaying the actual picture. The post can then be edited to use the "img" tags and show the picture instead of the link. This then pulls the picture each and every time that someone clicks on that forum, even if they have seen the picture before, thus using bandwidth unnecessarily. I would like to ask that we leave these as links so that those who WANT to see the picture(s) are the only ones who actually use that bandwidth. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask or post here - or IM me. I myself have been guilty of doing all of the above and will stop it so as to conserve bandwidth. No one has done anything wrong since this is the first time I have every mentioned any of this. I appreciate everyone's help with this!
Thanks!
BTW, if you do have a web site or another site and want to link to them using a logo of AA, I made those downloadable (including a flash logo) over 6 months ago here:
http://www.airsoftarizona.com/AA_banner_logos.zip (or use the "Links" from the main table of contents)
That way, you get to use the AA logo(s) without having to use the logo directly from this site.
