A great resource is threatened.

November 4, 2001 3:37 PM

A great resource is threatened. The Internet FAQ Archives has lost its funding. Although the site is operated by volunteer labor, the bandwidth expenses are high. Can Kent make-up the difference with Paypal donations? Will a new sugardaddy be found? Will TextAds start appearing on the homepage?
posted by chipr (7 comments total)

The first thing they could do is compress all their FAQs. Text is so wasteful. Sure, it wouldn't be as convenient to have to download and decompress a ZIP or RAR archive, but it would probably cut bandwidth costs by 90%.
posted by krisjohn at 3:53 PM on November 4, 2001

is it really that good an idea to post a link to a site with bandwidth issues on mefi?

not that I'm complaining about your link. it's very valid as it would be a legitamite loss to the internet community if it were to vanish. sort of a catch-22, I guess?
posted by mcsweetie at 5:04 PM on November 4, 2001

mcsweetie wrote: is it really that good an idea to post a link to a site with bandwidth issues on mefi?

Maybe, maybe not ... it's the first time I've posted a link. I realize that as a discussion issue, on a scale of 1 to 10 it's about a -3. My thinking was that this is something people might want to know about, and you aren't going to find out about it by reading Annanova.
posted by chipr at 6:14 PM on November 4, 2001

well, the point I was trying to make is that posting it is gonna increase their bandwidth usage quite a bit as a small flood of curious mefi users click the link.
posted by mcsweetie at 6:25 PM on November 4, 2001

chipr, thanks for letting us know about this.
posted by tranquileye at 6:31 PM on November 4, 2001

Don't some browsers (e.g. Mozilla) support seamless transfer and display of compressed HTML and text files?
posted by kindall at 8:26 PM on November 4, 2001

mcsweetie - Oh, I see. Well, I 'spose it could, but I was hoping a bit of publicity for their plight could be a good thing ... maybe even send a few Paypal donations their way. But you're right, it could just accelerate the end.

kindall - Yes, you are right. The HTTP/1.1 web standard supports Content-Encoding of compressed data. This can be handled transparently in the browser. Heck, it's even possible they already are implementing this feature. I'd have to take a closer look to tell.
posted by chipr at 9:01 PM on November 4, 2001