We have some Good news and some Bad news and need your help...

[Adina P]

We have some good news and bad news about DoodleKisses.com.

The good news is that we plan for DoodleKisses.com to continue on happily supplying us all with our doodle addiction.

The bad news is that the company that runs our website platform recently increased prices exponentially based on site data storage. They did this with very little advanced notice so we have a very short time to make some changes. Our choices are to either pay the new fee with it’s over ten-fold increase in monthly costs OR decrease the amount of old data we have stored.

We are choosing to decrease old files we have stored. Mostly because we think we can do this without any real difference in how you experience DK. We will be making a few changes to decrease our site data storage and we need your help in the next two weeks. Our goal is to remove 5 GB of data. To put this in perspective, it’s about 1% of what our site contains. We will keep you posted on our progress. The main culprits are videos and photos.

Deleting discussions is not something we will be doing as it has almost no impact on the amount of data stored. Words and discussions just aren’t big files! We plan to do this reduction in phases where we only move on to the next phase ONLY if we have not decreased our data storage sufficiently with the actions thus far.

Phase One: Ask members to remove redundant / old photos and videos that you have uploaded. We don’t want you to remove your good stuff! We just want to remove files if you have multiple similar images/videos, etc. If we reduce enough here, we’re done!

Phase Two: If we need further cuts, we will dig deeper with your own personal cuts. Again, we really don’t want to remove anything useful or good. Just old extraneous stuff. Start identifying old and low quality images/videos from long inactive members and removing those.

Phase Three: We as admins will remove videos and photos we see as extraneous.

We’ll keep you posted on how we are doing. Thank you for your understanding and help!

Adina & Clark

[F, Calla & Luca]

Ages ago you announced that DK would be moving to a new platform and that never happened. This platform has been full of glitches for a long time. What happened with the potential move? Also, I would imagine that the photography group is a big culprit re: space. I would hate to see any of our content removed but if it has to happen I hope you can let me and the group members have some say in what is removed. Thanks for all you do and your consideration.

[Adina P]

Technically it was going to be the 'updated' platform within the same system. We wanted to wait until we were prepared and had a chance to try it out. The 'try it out' option was then removed. And the company keeps changing things. So. I have no updates. Clark can probably explain better. We will definitely let you and PG members lead in any removal of PG stuff. Hopefully we won't have to go there.

[Adina P]

You know how the iphone went from just being an iphone to being an iphone 3G to an iphone 5, 6, ... are we at 7 yet?  Well, F, Calla & Luca, it's kind of like that. We were going to migrate to the next 'generation.' But they have put migration to the new platform on hold.  So even if we were ready to upgrade today, it's not presently an option. 

[Karen, Jasper and Jackdoodle]

I think there are a lot of members who have been inactive on the site for years, and will not see these notices, yet deleting some of their content might solve most of the problem. (Especially breeders who no longer participate and have dozens and dozens of photos of litters that have long since been sold, etc.) 

[Jane, Guinness and Murphy]

I think that's a great idea.  If someone hasn't posted anything in over a year, it would probably be fine to delete their photos and videos.  I just tried to delete some of mine....I managed to get rid of three videos but then I just couldn't bring myself to do more. 

[ClarkP]

We will be do this.  We just have to go in and delete them individually.  We don't want to just delete their whole profile because that may leave "holes" in discussion or anywhere they wrote stuff.  Maybe it's just my pet peave, but I hate reading old discussions where there are a bunch of missing comments.  Tough to tell what was said.

But yes, we will be deleting old litter pix.  I've done some myself already.

[Linda, Charlie Brown and Beau]

Ok - going in now to delete.

[Karen, Jasper and Jackdoodle]

I have a question. What happens if you delete a photo that is tagged for one of the past slideshows? 

[BG and Gavin]

So just an idea...the music files that some people load to their pages...these must take up a lot of space. Maybe that could be cut without much pain?

[Karen, Jasper and Jackdoodle]

Good idea!

[Joanne ~ Spud*]

Great Idea.  Adina, music files? 

[ClarkP]

Yup.  Music files are big too.  Removing unwanted music will certainly make a difference.