Mail box size? - Reduced

[dhutch]

Has someone tweaked the inbox size down?

Lots of mention of PMs not being able to be sent including to me own, when I looked at my own it appears to show 65 in a max size of 50 and hence 'over full' somehow, which was not the case a few weeks ago.

Can we have it back to 150 or something? I like to keep a small number to remember who I talked to about what. Dont expect the storage space costs much.

Daniel

[Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Chairman]

It's only a limit of 50 PM's per page isn't it? Can you not have more than one page now?

[Captain Colonial]

I've just logged in as you Daniel and looked in your PM area without opening any PMs (of course).  You have 0 new conversations and 31 saved conversations, 4 of which have been deleted by the person who started them.  You have used 62% of your available PM space.

 

The PM inbox limit for members has always been 50, and this has never been changed and is still the case, so you still have room for another 19 PMs.

[dhutch]

The PM inbox limit for members has always been 50.

Odd.

I have just had a big clear out, which half the number to what you see now, however I can assure you there where about 63 or so the morning I wrote this thread.

Daniel

[dhutch]

Without wishing to bang on about this my inbox is full again, and most of them are messages i have saved over the ten years I've been a member which contain things i do not want to remove from the site.

And we increase inbox size? Even if only for members with over 100 posts or something.

The amount of space they take up is tiny compared to the rest of the forum database I'm sure.

 

Daniel

[Kingster]

I'll have a butcher's 

[dhutch]

Sounds promising! 

[Kingster]

Might not be today though! Busy with family 

[Captain Colonial]

To assist our noble webmaster and his long-suffering family, I've had a look on his behalf.

Just to reiterate, the PM storage limit for members has always been 50 conversations.  (If you saw a number higher than 50, it's probable that included PMs that had been started by another party which they had since deleted, but which was still included in the total number of PMs in your list.). AOs have a limit of 100, and Admin have unlimited conversation storage out of necessity, but I've never had more than 20 in storage personally.  As you can deduce from this, limits are set and based on what user group you are in, and cannot be adjusted for individual members.

One of the reasons for limits is the same as there are limits on photos - storage capacity.  We didn't want (and can't have) the forums turning into a Flickr type setup because this is a forum, not a photo storage website.  This is the same reason posting videos directly in a post is not allowed - size.  The new forums have the ability to allow attaching files in PM conversations, thus increasing the size of the PM accordingly.  This is one of the reasons the limit has been previously set at 50 conversations.

Please also bear in mind a conversation can be a PM and one reply, or a PM and 1,000 replies, so that varies the amount of storage room they take up as well.

However, we can trial increasing the limit to see if there are any repercussions that would affect the smooth operation of the forums.  To this end, I have changed the limit from 50 to 100 for members to see what happens, if anything.  If there are no issues after a period of viability has passed, we can stay at 100.

Here comes the conditions:

a) If it does cause issues, the limit will be reduced back to 50 immediately

b) If a) occurs and you have more than 50 conversations going, we cannot guarantee the conversations in excess of 50 will not be instantly deleted, or which conversations will be deleted - I suspect it would be the oldest ones first

c) The webmaster shall have the final say in all matters as he has to look after things that we all rely on

That's it - let's see what happens.

[Kingster]

Cheers Scott. All good as far as I'm concerned 

[darve]

If it gets reverted I suggest it would be an idea to give some notice to allow people to get back under the 50 limit. I imagine if some people's oldest messages got automatically deleted, there would be a few upset members

[Captain Colonial]

2 hours ago, darve said:

If it gets reverted I suggest it would be an idea to give some notice to allow people to get back under the 50 limit. I imagine if some people's oldest messages got automatically deleted, there would be a few upset members

I agree of course, if it is possible.  I doubt the increase will cause issues, and reducing it would only take place if the poo really hits the fan because of the increase.  You will appreciate my need to cover my backside in the highly unlikely event that it all goes Pete Tong.

[dhutch]

Sounds good.

[dhutch]

Hopefully you have seen no issues? As a reference point, on our very similar and also Invision based forum we have the user limit set to 1000 and have had no issues with the size of the database.

We obviously have some limits on our photos also, but not ones most users are ever likely to hit. Images are stored using Amazon S3 which we find to be very cost effective and gives good performance, allowing a large number of photos while keeping the disk requirements of the server very manageable and within the confines of an off the shelf SSD based VPS packing.

 

Daniel

CanalWorld.net

[Kingster]

7 minutes ago, dhutch said:

Hopefully you have seen no issues? As a reference point, on our very similar and also Invision based forum we have the user limit set to 1000 and have had no issues with the size of the database.

We obviously have some limits on our photos also, but not ones most users are ever likely to hit. Images are stored using Amazon S3 which we find to be very cost effective and gives good performance, allowing a large number of photos while keeping the disk requirements of the server very manageable and within the confines of an off the shelf SSD based VPS packing.

 

Daniel

CanalWorld.net

Might chat to you about the S3 solution Daniel. But also happy to increase capacity as needed.