What stops a good site from being great.

Previews have been generated with a high quality for about two weeks, about a week before the new site was launched. I'm sorry that you dont care for them, but the overall reaction has been positive.

//Post moved to General > Community

 

 

The redesign looks wonderful, and as soon as I found out about it, I rushed over to see it...only to be disappointed by the same quality thumbnail previews as before.

Older items still show the poor thumbnails. All brand new and newly updated items are using a much improved image quality settings. Hopefully, once more skins/themes/icons that are updated on the site, this problem will work its self out. As it stands right now, most images in the gallery (beyond the first couple pages) are of the older quality, but that will change as time moves on. 

For a hint on how to improve any old skins that you may have uploaded in the past, simply update it and re-upload a new thumbnail, and the new thumb should be noticeably better.

Why not have the server re-compress the old thumbnails with the new settings, say as an idle priority task in the background so as not to affect the server performance unduly? These are such tiny thumbnails, I'd think it would happen surprisingly quickly.

It's the sheer number from what I understand. I'm sure this wont stop people from speculating about our situation and what a server can handle and yadda yadda. Everyone likes to speculate as if they have some intimate knowledge of our backend systems. Or they base their argument from a corner of having some experience with web servers. The number of graphics that need to be reprocessed and then checked, and then double checked... it's more of a task than people may realize.

I appreciate your point Andrew, but let's be clear...

This is NOT a homegrown blogger site. It's a commercial site with commercial resources.

We're talking about THUMBNAIL (re)generation here, not SETI calculations.

At 1 second per thumbnail (if it takes you longer than that there is something wrong with the algorithm), any modern PC can (re) convert every graphic on this site into a new higher quality thumbnail at the rate of 86,400 images per DAY.

Instead of doing this all at once, one could insert a line of code to check each thumbnail upon request. If the thumbnail is before X date (the date of new algorithm), regenerate it. This would just happen to update the date immediately and automatically. From that point on that thumbnail would never need to be regenerated.

So this is only done once, for the first NEW request of a thumbnail, and so after a few weeks of (presumably) slightly longer searches, you could even remove this one short routine I suspect.

This would avoid reconverting everything even once, which I still don't see as a huge issue.

It's just a suggestion. Feel free to ignore.

huh?

I'm devolving into programmer speak, sorry about that Bandit4edu.

Its fine i have no problems, if i think it may be questionable if i like or not i jsut download and try, doesnt take but a sec.

I actually think regenerating the thumbnails might be worthwhile. I tend to have the same opinion about the quality of the older thumbnails.

Since we're talking about thumbnails...how come the thumbs on the main gallery page and on the personal pages looked cropped? It's like it's only showing the top corner instead of a resized version of the entire image. Once you actually view a gallery they look normal.

Yeah, I noticed that too. Does look a bit odd.