When you click on the Classmate Profile link there's a box to check that will allow you to "show yearbook photo." Is there a way to make this a default option so that whenever anyone clicks on the Classmate Profile link it automatically defaults to the show yearbook photo option?

I think I would like that also. I get messages from classmates wondering where are the Senior pictures .. I used to have a Senior picture page, then took it off when this option came available.

No. I can give you 3 good reasons for not doing so:

1) By just showing text, it's easy to see at a glance who has joined the site, updated Profile recently, is attending the reunion, etc. without having to do a lot of scrolling.

2) Yearbook photo pages can be a very long load for some Classmates, especially dialup users, but in some cases even some DSL connections or office connections. Depending on the size of the class, there can be hundreds of photos on the same page, so while making this a default option may work ok for some people, it won't for others.

3) Something that most people would never consider, but we have to consider, is system resources. When a Classmate hits a Senior Photo page which typically has hundreds of photos, that 1 individual user is now making hundreds of image requests to the system. That alone is no problem, but now factor in that a half million people could do the same thing at the same time. Of course not all of them will do that at the same time, but let's say 1/100th of 1% do that at the same time. You now have 500 people making simultaneous image requests. If an average class has 200 Classmates, that's 100,000 simultaneous images requests sent to the system. And when that happens, the entire system slows way down. Now, one could make the argument that 500 people could simultaneously click the "Show Yearbook Photos" checkbox and still cause 100,000 image requests to the system, which is very true. But, we know from the logs this doesn't happen -- most people will browse the Classmates page in text mode the majority of the time.

And there ya go. That's why we don't defualt the system to automatically show Yearbook Photos.

yeah, but if you have a small class and you'd like to set that as the 'default for your class' not necessarily for every site, then it would make sense, especially for those of us who spent hours scaning in pages, croping and loading them.

But, of course, your points are all well taken as well.

Jim

Hear ya. Even if we showed that toggle for classes of let's say 50 or fewer Classmates, if enough people toggle that on we could easily still get a huge system drain. In general it's not good practice to load a significant # of images on a single page. In this case, the yearbook images are very small, we have a new bank of mega servers that handle the current load fine, and not enough people do it simultaneously to cause any system performace issues. But this is one area, at least for the time being anyway, we should leave alone.