Recently i had to partially close down WCSMT. The reason is one of those things that seem like a good thing but on which i am currently unable to capitalize. It just got too damn popular.
I run a dedicated server at Media Temple which was quite the investment for me, but i did it because WCSMT had gotten me booted out of my current shared hosting plan when it hit the homepage of digg.com and i just liked the project too much to let it die at that point. I knew that the sheer size of the generated animated .gifs would pile up and make it break down again,but i figure i would have at least a year to worry about a solution. This need for lots of storage space and bandwidth has always been the aquiles heel of WCSMT.
A couple of weeks ago i did a couple of updates that changed the dynamic of how the mini-site worked. In addition to see a grid of random animations, the site allowed to browse them freely in a time based matter, one page at a time, and it got to a point were it was been used as a kind of graphical chat system. People would “chat” with stop-motion-animation made with animated .gifs. Nice! People were having fun doing animation which was the whole point of the game. I was getting on average 100 new pages a day (sometimes more). Thats 1,600 stop motion animations per day! WOW!
However in less than 2 weeks i received an automated notice from my host telling me how at the current rate of growth i would have an outstanding bandwidth bill of over US$1000 on top of what i had already paid. This is something i cannot afford at the moment and thus i was forced to close down the animation ‘maker’ application and to revert back from the updates i had done.
This WCSMT experiment has proven very successful as a concept but a complete failure from a technical stand point. For this project to continue i must redesign the system to be lighter in disk storage and bandwidth. Most likely i will have to ditch the animated .gif format for something lighter. Most likely a combination of flash player and PNG/JPG images or maybe the animated PNG format . Ill probably have to implement a regulating policy where older animation will be deleted at set periods.
To the followers of the WCSMT , i must thank for their interest on the game and their willingness to participate and share. It has been great having you and i hope to re-open soon.
Cheers
