Hi all,
the free plan Groups.io option allows up to 1 Gbyte for files, attachments, and photos in total. The usage Today reached 80% of that limit, mainly because of a few rather selfish individuals who have attached very large images or other files to their posts, and often not helped by others replying and quoting the whole of the original post including the images.
In order to avoid automatic deletion of older attachments, or bouncing of all posts with attachments (the two automatic options offered by Groups.io), I have taken the arbitrary decision to delete all message attachments contributing more than 1 Mbyte per post. This took me a long time as each post has to be edited to achieve that, and I would rather no one has to do that again too often. In order to try and control the plan storage usage, for now, I have set all posts to be moderated if they have attachments and will ask moderators to reject posts with more than 1 Mbyte of attachments with a message to the poster that they consider re-posting with smaller attachments. Moderating all posts with attachments is a lot to ask of group moderators so I would rather that option is only used temporarily to ensure regular posters understand the need to keep attachment sizes to a reasonable size.
This action has only reduced plan storage usage from 80% to 35%, so it it cannot be a permanent fix, and users must try and help here. Please do not post screen captures of whole desktops, particularly from Mac systems, although the same applies for all systems with high resolution monitors. Screen capture tools allow portions or single windows to be captured. If you really feel that large files or images are needed to augment your posts then please do so by posting links where the content can be downloaded rather than using up storage allocation shared by all group members. Do not post photographs as attachments, so many users who post photos seem to do so without any attempt to resize the images to reasonable file sizes. Even a smartphone camera these days creates images of many Mbytes size.
This is not an attempt to stop posters using images to explain or reply to issues, as we all know a picture can be worth a thousand words, but please be considerate and remember that we are sharing a free to use resource here.
Apologies to those that have their old posts arbitrarily edited to remove large attachments, I am sure that some may contain useful information for the group, but there is just not time to review each post in detail and make such decisions.
73
Bill
G4WJS.
