Alright, I see a lot of people asking questions like this.
Does that waste bandwidth too? Sorry if thats a dumb question, but I dont really know?
Its not a dumb question because not everyone understands computers and how networks work.
It seems that people on here think that when you are posting a picture of your car that picture is taking EXTRA bandwidth. This is simply not true, the only way that it would take extra bandwidth is if the image was stored on G2IC’s server. Most members on here store their pictures on sites such as imagestation or from their own webserver. Everytime the page is loaded up the only bandwidth that g2ic uses is to load the text and the images that are used by the bulletin board software. The image of the persons car is actually taken away from imagestations bandwidth quota (if they even have one).
People often believe that post whoring takes away a TON of bandwidth, while this is true, but there is also another little known habit that also takes away from G2IC’s bandwidth, if you are hitting the refresh button ever minute to see if there’s new messages you are probably taking up just as much bandwidth as your local postwhore. Everytime you hit refresh, your computer sends out a request to have the page reloaded. Then the page is sent out to your computer, but guess what?? This does infact take away from the bandwidth quota of G2IC, because all that information on the page needs to be sent out!! So if you want to save bandwidth, I would suggest that you not hit refresh on the boards so much or even spend every waking hour on the boards.
BTW, if you’re on and the boards are really slow and you think no one posted, hitting the back button to look at the rest of the topics actually saves on bandwidth because it is being loaded off your computer. Internet Explorer and Netscape have this handy thing of where they save the information from the pages you go on, neat eh??
I hope that this clears up any issues that you might have regarding bandwidth and gives you a better understanding of it. If there is any questions that you have regarding this subject, feel free to ask me.
You can check out for yourself about images not taking bandwidth, at the bottom of the page I have put an “I AM” logo on the bottom of the page, right click on it and then select properties, (if you’re on a mac I have no freakin idea how to do this nor do I care :p) if you look at the address line, you’ll notice it comes off Oregon State University’s engineering server, not G2IC’s
(the thumbup does take away from G2IC’s bandwidth every time you or anyone else looks at this page)