Forum Moderators: rogerd
Visitors send me pictures with their comment and I edit the pictures and then include them (helps me keep the images as small as possible).
I recently installed a caching plugin and noticed my visitor count up by thousands per day. This tells me my pages were way too large and I need to do something.
What works best? Limit comments (and if so, what's the best plugin), or, very small thumbnails (if so, again, what is the best plugin), or, something else?
What would you do?
I don't think limiting comments would be a great idea. Using thumbnails would be excellent - people can see the image in small size, and choose to view it in larger scale if they want.
If you are getting hundreds of comments, automating the process is a good idea, too. Some software has a provision for accepting user uploads and automatically displaying thumbnails. vBulletin forum software does it - you might check your blog software to see if there's a plugin that will do that. With the high rate of user participation, perhaps forum software would be worth considering as way of fostering even more interaction and allowing users to start their own topics.
On an unrelated note, if you are letting users upload images, be sure your TOS has some strong language about posting copyrighted content (or other problematic stuff) and provides contact info for copyright holders to let you know if one of your users has ripped them off.
