I am working on this for a class, I thought I would get some user's input over here...
http://www.cougarnuts.com/board/showthread.php?p=123310
Please post over there if you can, I'd like to get all of the information in one spot if possible.
Thanks :D
I don't post on Cougarnuts, but I do read the threads on a regular basis. One thing we could use on BOTH sites if it was feasable is a gallery fore each member consisting of maybe 1 or 2 MB of space per member. Like I said I'm not sure if this is realistic or not. The sites I've seen that have this usually have sponsor money pouring into them which means ads all over the place. I kinda like the fact that these 2 sites don't.
We've got 2GB of web space and 30GB/month transfer with this forum. It may seem like a lot, but this forum is growing rapidly, and every thread, every avatar, every attached file takes up space. We're currently at 347MB and last month we used a bit more than 12GB of bandwidth. This forum is only a year old - as we grow those number will undoubtely go up, and when they do something's gotta give - for instance, once we start approaching the storage limit we may have to start deleting uploaded files. It's a long way off, but it is something that will eventually have to happen. Adding a feature that allowed people to create their own websites would only bring that day closer.
That being said, there is no reason a bunch of people couldn't go in on a website together and upload images, build websites, or whatever. It could be a pay thing - perhaps charge $10/yr for 10MB of space, with your own subdomain (for instance, if you had a site called http://www.tbirdcougarpics.com the subdomains could reflect user names, such as http://cougars2go.tbirdcougarpics.com)
Unfortunately I'm far, far too busy to administer something like that, so if y'all want do do something like that yourselves you're on your own. I'd be able to offer advice but that's about it.
And that's why I try to shrink all my attachments down before uploading. No reason for a 500k+ picture, when 10 seconds with a graphics program can compress it to 80k, and a crop/resize can make it even smaller. Sure they're pretty when they completely fill a 29" monitor, but....