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Traffic optimization

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Eulalia said:
yes

at present, it is possible for 'guests' to see full-size images (uploaded to the site or externally hosted) without registering or logging in, though they can't open thumbnails or attached files, or view videos.
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What I meant was if it'd be ok to change the setting so that even such images uploaded to CF (rather than to an external host like Imgur) can be accessed without a login.

If it's possible, there's a chance that we can tweak the settings further so that images can load much faster than they did before, and with only a fraction of the traffic they used to generate. (Those large images were probably the most significant source of the traffic problem).
 
Eulalia said:
yes

at present, it is possible for 'guests' to see full-size images (uploaded to the site or externally hosted) without registering or logging in, though they can't open thumbnails or attached files, or view videos.
Click to expand...

I think we should require membership to view images. It's not like it cost anything.

I'm using Imgur (and other hosting sites) for 90% of my images/videos because someone said it saves space, thus saving money. It's not hard to do, so can't we ask everyone to do that? If you're posting an attachment that takes up more than 200KB, couldn't we require it be hosted?
 
poem21045 said:
I think we should require membership to view images. It's not like it cost anything.

I'm using Imgur (and other hosting sites) for 90% of my images/videos because someone said it saves space, thus saving money. It's not hard to do, so can't we ask everyone to do that? If you're posting an attachment that takes up more than 200KB, couldn't we require it be hosted?
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But if everyone uses an external image host, wouldn't it also make anonymous users to see the images posted that way? Maybe I didn't explain my question sufficiently well, as it can be rather counter-intuitive. In fact, the change I'd like to see made is not requiring membership to view images, because the current system prevents the CDN to cache protected images, thus limiting the effectiveness of using such a system.

As I understand it, there are two benefits of requiring login to view full-sized images. First off, it may prevent outsiders from realizing how perverted we are :) And also, it may prevent those fellow perverts who haven't joined the site yet for whatever reason from leeching those images (potentially with a crawler program) so they exhaust the traffic quota and cost us more money.

As such, if we are encouraging people to use an external host to post images, it means that we don't really care about the first of those problems. (I'm ok with it myself, for the record. Everyone knows I'm perverted anyway.)

As for the second problem, it would cause trouble in a normal situation. But now we have a free CDN working as a proxy, we don't have to care how many users request those images. What we need to care is how much of those requests actually reach the origin, that is the server that runs CF.

Currently, 100% of those request reach the server since CF does not cache protected images (reports "CF-Cache-Status: DYNAMIC"). We may be able to change that so that only a small fraction of them reach the server and add to the traffic quota, if we lift the login requirement and expose them for anonymous access.

That is why I like to ask the opinion of our moderators and members, and the site owner about the matter.

P.S. After writing this, I realized there could be the third reason why we may want to keep the requirement, which could be motivating more people to join the site. However, I suppose it would becomes a moot point like the first problem, once we encourage our members to use an external image host because images posted that way would be accessible without a login.
 
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I claim no expertise whatsoever in these matters, but a couple of things that concern me right now as we pursue this are: 1) now that IM appears to have lifted the restrictions that slowed the site down during the summer, making changes at this point in time to enhance speed seems to me to be less pressing or no longer even necessary. 2) It seems to me that site security is more the issue now. 3) I personally find great value in the fact that viewers must become members in order to open images/materials on the site. In other words, given the kind of site this is, I prefer to limit full access as much as possible to those who are willing to register and can be vetted in the process.

So, in my view, I would prefer at this point to focus only on those changes that tighten security ... ie., eliminating the “not secure” message I see on my browser whenever I log in.

Excuse my ignorance and misunderstandings in these matters, but there’s my two cents.
 
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fallenmystic said:
But if everyone uses an external image host, wouldn't it also make anonymous users to see the images posted that way? Maybe I didn't explain my question sufficiently well, as it can be rather counter-intuitive. In fact, the change I'd like to see made is not requiring membership to view images, because the current system prevents the CDN to cache protected images, thus limiting the effectiveness of using such a system.

As I understand it, there are two benefits of requiring login to view full-sized images. First off, it may prevent outsiders from realizing how perverted we are :) And also, it may prevent those fellow perverts who haven't joined the site yet for whatever reason from leeching those images (potentially with a crawler program) so they exhaust the traffic quota and cost us more money.

As such, if we are encouraging people to use an external host to post images, it means that we don't really care about the first of those problems. (I'm ok with it myself, for the record. Everyone knows I'm perverted anyway.)

As for the second problem, it would cause trouble in a normal situation. But now we have a free CDN working as a proxy, we don't have to care how many users request those images. What we need to care is how much of those requests actually reach the origin, that is the server that runs CF.

Currently, 100% of those request reach the server since CF does not cache protected images (reports "CF-Cache-Status: DYNAMIC"). We may be able to change that so that only a small fraction of them reach the server and add to the traffic quota, if we lift the login requirement and expose them for anonymous access.

That is why I like to ask the opinion of our moderators and members, and the site owner about the matter.

P.S. After writing this, I realized there could be the third reason why we may want to keep the requirement, which could be motivating more people to join the site. However, I suppose it would becomes a moot point like the first problem, once we encourage our members to use an external image host because images posted that way would be accessible without a login.
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Barbaria1 said:
I claim no expertise whatsoever in these matters, but a couple of things that concern me right now as we pursue this are: 1) now that IM appears to have lifted the restrictions that slowed the site down during the summer, making changes at this point in time to enhance speed seems to me to be less pressing or no longer even necessary. 2) It seems To me site security is more the issue now. 3) I personally find great value in the fact that viewers must become members in order to open images/materials on the site. In other words, given the kind of site this is, I prefer to see use of the site limited, as much as possible, to limit full access as much as possible to those who are willing to register and can be vetted in the process.

So, in my view, I would prefer at this point to focus only on those changes that tighten security ... ie., eliminating the “not secure” message I see on my browser whenever I log in.

Excuse my ignorance and misunderstandings in these matters, but there’s my two cents.
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I have no idea of 98% of the technical questions that are being discussed here. But I do have some concerns:
1. I whole-heartedly agree with Barb that security should be a top priority.
2. I worry about making changes that could have unexpected consequences and even crash the site.
3. Changes in rules and methods for posting must be made very slowly and with very great care. This can impact members who don't read this thread and might seriously offend some. I know how to post what I post now. If I suddenly got messages "Not permitted," I would be very disturbed.
In the end, I would probably blame it on @Barbaria1
 
To clarify a few things:

1. The suggested change wouldn't allow annonymous users to post or have any implication whatsoever on security except making full-sized images viewable without a login.

2. I wholeheartedly agree that the security better be a priority now. And now we are in a better position than ever to apply HTTPS because we are already on Cloudflare and they provide an easy way to do that which may be free or cost at most 2$/month. (This will eliminate the "Not Secure" message Barbaria mentioned.)

3. Even though using a CDN and other measures probably already have helped making the site to load faster, the suggested change will probably reduce the monthly cost required to maintain the site significantly, if it can be applied successfully.

P.S.: As to the ambiguity about the price in no. 2, it's because I don't use Cloudflare so I can only guess from what they publicly announce. (I wish I had an access to the management tools of CF's Cloudflare account so I can monitor the things and find out what other options we could use to optimize it further.)

From what I understand, it looks like they provide a free SSL(HTTPS) option which can be enabled by just clicking on a checkbox (then no more "Not Secure" warnings!) from what I gather from this page. I believe this also applies to a free account, but if not, it's definitely included in the 'Pro' plan which just cost 2$/month.
 
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I agree that we should keep images locked down to members only.
Remember, encouraging members to use external hosting sites was a temporary move to get us through a period where speed and cost were issues for the site. That time has now passed, and we should rethink the widespread use of hosts like imagur or the overuse of direct links to other sites.
I get your point Fallenmystic that exposing images to the CDN will make a big difference to the number of hits on CF's server, but I'm not sure if the benefit is worth it. Might need to do some reading on the security features of free Cloudflare.
 
phlebas said:
Remember, encouraging members to use external hosting sites was a temporary move to get us through a period where speed and cost were issues for the site. That time has now passed, and we should rethink the widespread use of hosts like imagur or the overuse of direct links to other sites.
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Yes, this is an important point.


phlebas said:
I get your point Fallenmystic that exposing images to the CDN will make a big difference to the number of hits on CF's server, but I'm not sure if the benefit is worth it.
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I get that too, but also am not sure that’s what we really want.
 
Barbaria1 said:
I get that too, but also am not sure that’s what we really want.
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Who wouldn't want to save quite a few (probably be much more) dollars every month? :)

But I understand your concerns about changing the forum rules as to who can view images posted by our members. If many people are reluctant to take that course, I won't press the issue further.

Probably we should fix what we now can easily do first:

@ImageMaker Could you look into the dashboard and see if you can change the "SSL" option to "Flexible", as shown below?

configuring-ssl-with-cloudflare.svg

(Image hosted on an external host)

If I understood it correctly, this will setup a free SSL certificate (Let's Encrypt maybe?) and automatically redirect HTTP to HTTPS, fixing the long-overdue security warning from browsers.
 
Barbaria1 said:
Yes, this is an important point.




I get that too, but also am not sure that’s what we really want.
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Well, I'm now confused.

Should I stop using sites like Imgur to host images & videos? I thought that action was saving money. But if it isn't, or it has some deleterious effect, please let me ( & everyone else) know!
:lunchacos:
Uh oh. Are emojis allowed?
 
poem21045 said:
I thought that action was saving money.
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I won't comment on whether or not we should keep encouraging the practice, but from the technical standpoint, yes using an external host definitely saves money.

It was a temporary measure to workaround a problem, but the problem itself was caused by an excessive amount of the traffic. So in case the measure we took with the CDN proves to be insufficient, and unless we pay more to the hosting service to increase the quota, the problem will likely return if everyone goes back to the old practice of uploading images directly to CF.

(The good thing is, however, even if the problem reappears in future, you won't see a lot of the thumbnails or avatars fail to load as before because now they are served from a CDN.)
 
fallenmystic said:
I won't comment on whether or not we should keep encouraging the practice, but from the technical standpoint, yes using an external host definitely saves money.

It was a temporary measure to workaround a problem, but the problem itself was caused by an excessive amount of the traffic. So in case the measure we took with the CDN proves to be insufficient, and unless we pay more to the hosting service to increase the quota, the problem will likely return if everyone goes back to the old practice of uploading images directly to CF.

(The good thing is, however, even if the problem reappears in future, you won't see a lot of the thumbnails or avatars fail to load as before because now they are served from a CDN.)
Click to expand...

Thanks, FM. I'll just keep stumbling along on my present course in the digital darkness.
:nusenuse:

(Boy, I sure hope emojis don't get banned!)
 
@ImageMaker I just noticed that the site is now accessible using HTTPS protocol. We are almost there, but it looks like we have two more things to do before we can fix the insecure connection problem once and for all:

1. We have two images which are referenced by hardcoded HTTP URLs:
I assume you have put those URLs using XenForo's admin panel somewhere. If it is the case, drop the domain part of those URLs, for example, like changing "http://cruxforums.com/xf/images/youcanhelpdonatenow.jpg" to just "/xf/images/youcanhelpdonatenow.jpg" (and the same goes for the other image).

2. We need to prevent users from accessing the site the old way, namely using the insecure HTTP URL. You can achieve this by enabling "Always Use HTTPS" option from the Cloudflare admin console, as shown in the following image:

image2-1.png

(Image hosted on an external site)

I believe changing those two will fix the insecure connection problem once and for all for our website.

EDIT: I suspect there's a setting on the XenForo's side which redirects users to the old URL. It may cause an endless redirection problem in conjuction with 2. So, please, look at XenForo settings to see if there's any entry which specifies the old URL (starting with 'http://...') and either change it to the new one ('https://) or use the same measure as explained in 1 to fix it.

@ everyone : Now you can change your bookmark to the website as https://www.cruxforums.com/xf/ (instead of http://...) The warning message will remain until we fix the first of the mentioned problems but at least, your login information will now properly protected against sniffing attempts if you use the new address.

Once the second problem is dealt with, you will get automatically redirected to the secure website, so it won't be strictly necessary. But there's no need to use the old address and get redirected everytime you visit CF, so I'd advise you to change it.
 
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In my opinion we should definitely keep a login as a requirement to enlarge thumbnails into the full size.

Not so much for reason of cost, or concealing our depravity ...
... but because that way at least you get anonymous users to interact insofar as the register ... and a few more of those will then make the jump to also participate.
 
I've just checked, I type in www.cruxforums.com and that still accesses the site and lets me log in. The url still shows 'Not secure' and 'cruxforums.com'', no https/ etc. Should I expect that to change?

Indeed, externally hosted images do save cost, and we're grateful that members have been using them for that reason.
But there are a few concerns:
  • the fact that they show up full-size means they're visible to anyone who happens to find the site, whether registered or not
  • successive posts containing full-size images (even several such images) clutter up threads and are not convenient for viewing on many types of equipment
  • some external images carry (hidden) links to source sites, and we're uneasy about the range of unknown and possibly very dodgy sites that are being linked on ours
So we ask members who are posting external hosted images to state where they're hosted.
 
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