Shutting down guest access last month was a start in our efforts to curb the forum's bandwidth usage. And, thankfully, our host didn't warn us this month that the forum's server CPU usage went past its allotted 10%. However, not shutting down registrations sooner than we did seems to have contributed to more bandwidth usage because our August total increased by more than 9% over what it had been in July! So, in an effort to further curb bandwidth usage, I've installed some new YaBB modifications that should hopefully keep the forum's host from shutting us down again like they did back in July.
First off, you'll notice that the YaBBC buttons and Smileys no longer appear when you make a new post or edit an old one. This can be reversed by going into your profiles and unchecking the "Disable showing of YaBBC Buttons?" and "Disable showing of Smiley Buttons?" boxes in the new "Fastload Options" section. However, I would ask you to please not do this - or at least that you do it
only for
short periods while there's some YaBBC feature that you might like to try on the forum that you haven't already. Otherwise, the best thing to do would be to familiarize yourselves with the YaBBC and Smileys codes in the forum's Help section so that you'll be able to type them into your posts yourselves rather than relying on the buttons.
Second, I've installed the collapsible BoardIndex feature. This feature is pretty much self-explanatory, so I'll let you all experiment with it on your own. However, I would encourage you to at least collapse the "General Discussions Archive" and "Why Register?" categories. (Cousins who have access to the Members' Archive are also encouraged to collapse the "Members' Gateway" as well.) When new posts are made in these categories, the "New Posts" icon will appear in front of the category to alert you, so you won't be missing anything by collapsing them - but you
will be helping to save bandwidth.
And third, you may notice that the forum's pages are downloading faster. That's because I've installed a compression utility which should significantly cut the forum's server CPU and bandwidth usage. However, if you're using a version of IE prior to 5.5, this utility
may cause you some problems. I say "may" because it seems that only a handful of people using older versions of IE have reported problems to YaBB. IE 5.5 and 6.0 both work fine, so if you do experience problems, upgrading your browser would be your best bet. There have been no problems reported with Netscape 6.0 and later.