Over the last year and especially the last three months, the Clinic has seen a large increase in the members who regularly visit the site. This increase puts additional strain on the servers, which at times has reached our maximum bandwidth capacity. The Clinic is a free resource for RoadStar owners (although donations are welcome) and we would like to continue this tradition. Our goal is and always has been to provide a place where knowledge of Road Stars could be easily accessed in a way that provides a positive experience for all who come here.

While the majority of us who frequent the clinic are now using some form of Broadband internet access, we still have a fair number of users that access the clinic via dial up internet access, and a diminishing number of users who have older screens smaller than 1024x768 pixels. One of the features of the Clinic that can present a challenge for these users is our sig pics. For dial up users, downloading large resolution pictures can take a really long time, and downloading several is truly awful. Dial up users will often quit trying to load a page with high resolution pictures rather than wait minutes for them to load. Users with low resolution screens often grow frustrated when we have pictures that are very tall as it can take many screens of scrolling for them to access the text in posts.

The Clinic staff has been discussing how members can continue to showcase their bikes through the use of a sig pic while keeping resource requirements for them minimal.

The staff were guided by the principle of maximizing the clinic experience for all our members, while keeping parameters within acceptable ranges for our friends on dial up and with lower resolution screens. We are, therefore, providing the following guidance regarding sig pics:

- Ensure that the size of the photo, on the website used as a sig pic, is no more than 450 pixels wide and 50 kb in size. The photo should also not be higher than 450 pixels. Using a photo this size means that dial up users won't spend minutes trying to load forum posts where these photos are included.
- Only one photo meeting the above size restriction should be used for a sig pic. The photo can however have multiple images within it.
- There should not be any other graphics within the sig pic area, except perhaps a weather banner should you choose to include one.

Over the next few weeks, members should ensure that their sig pics meet the above guidelines. The staff will be available to help those that do not have the resources to resize their photos.

We appreciate your cooperation in this matter and hope your stay at the clinic is profitable and enjoyable.

The Road Star Clinic Staff