Character Sheet Software

[Neftren]

You know, it just occurred to me, we are are d20 and other dice related games forum on the side. With the massive amount of games going on here, wouldn't it make sense to have our very own GitP skinned Character Sheet using the 3e Profiler software? I'd definitely use it...

But then again, storing all those character sheets would be a pain and would take a lot of space I guess... I dunno, that's just my two cents.

[TheMeanDM]

If people (like me) thought that the site was having slow response time now....adding this kind of info would send that into the Marianas Trench...

[Neftren]

My solution to the Bandwidth Issue:

Wipe every thread under the following criteria:
• No New Posts within Two Weeks
• All Un-Archived PMs (1 Week Warning Time)
The post wipe would avoid the Homebrew forums.

This would clear up a lot of the server space.

[StickMan]

Wipe every thread under the following criteria:
• No New Posts within Two Weeks


Some how I don't think that would go over very well as I still look up info on threads I made or have Subscribed to all the time for referance that have been inactive for over a 1 year+ and some how I don't think I'm the only one who does that.

[NEO|Phyte]

I'm pretty sure that such a policy is pretty much never going to happen. I'm pretty sure the specifics as to WHY have been explained before, but it was likely a while ago, so I'm going to pretend that your idea WAS enacted and claim that the knowledge has been lost to the ages.

And really, its not like the bandwidth problem would magically disappear along with nearly all of the forum's history. There's still going to be lots of people coming and reading and posting, and thats not liable to change any time soon. The problem isn't that we're low on space, the problem is that too many people are wanting to see the space at once.

[Fax Celestis]

You could ask Reina, who hosts the unofficial "GitP" Pifro Profiler (http://pifro.com/pro/) to cook something up.

[Neftren]

You see, the issue I see right now is just server space. This does nothing to solve bandwidth issues and is not a thread to do such.

What I propose by the board wipe is to free up the held up space for the new character sheets. People who wish to preserve a thread can always save it, go to the Web Archives and turn back the clock, find the cached version of it etc. Myriads of ways of doing it. Basically I'm just proposing a method of freeing up space for the sheets that would fill the newly freed up space.

[purple gelatinous cube o' Doom]

I don't know why you'd add a character sheet to the boards when there are several sites, that have excellent programs for that purpose already.

[NEO|Phyte]

You see, the issue I see right now is just server space.

...Unless you have physical (or remote) access to the server GiantITP is on, how in the 9 bloody hells of Baator would you have the slightest clue regarding how much space the server has? For all we know there's terabytes of free space waiting to be filled with inane posts.

[Shhalahr Windrider]

You see, the issue I see right now is just server space. This does nothing to solve bandwidth issues and is not a thread to do such.

What I propose by the board wipe is to free up the held up space for the new character sheets.
The server problems are not space related. (At least, there's never been any indication of a space problem.) The problems are bandwidth and processessor usage. Hence being referred to as "bandwidth/load" issues. It's all about the number of people accessing what is stored and the efficiency with which such data is added, retrieved, or otherwise used.

[Neftren]

If there are indeed Terabytes of space on the server, why shouldn't we incorporate a CS Software? I doubt anyone outside of the boards would use it, but hey look at Myth-Weavers, they incorporate a sheet onto their boards, why can't we? I'm just putting forth a solution to the "Space" issue, if there really is one. I never said anything about bandwidth, other than a method of reducing the amount of things to load. Oh and we should probably impose a stricter image posting requirement...

Do you really think adding a GitP Skinned Tan and Brown Character Sheet to the boards will drastically increase server bandwidth? I don't.

[Guildorn Tanaleth]

Do you really think adding a GitP Skinned Tan and Brown Character Sheet to the boards will drastically increase server bandwidth?

It'll give people more places on the boards that they might want (or need) to go to, require more querying of the database (which will need more tables with more fields, as the sheets wouldn't be stored like a long post), and eventually people with little to no interest in OotS, Erf, or GiantITP itself will start coming here, creating accounts, and hosting loads of character sheets for their own games, hammering the server & using up even more resources, until eventually the server crumbles, everybody dies, and you get eaten by a grue. So yes, I do think that bandwidth might be a bit of a problem for your idea.

[Rawhide]

Thank you for the suggestion, but given the current issues with server load, server bandwidth (data per second) and throughput limit (data per month), this won't be considered for a long time.

Server space is most certainly not an issue, only (individual) database size. We already prune old threads in certain forums.

This thread is being locked to prevent any more wildly inaccurate speculation.