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

[David Sands]

I shoot with a Nikon D800 sometimes and files are up to 36 megapixels- per photo in high res modes! Yeah, legacy files on good cameras back in the day were sub 10 Meg-  Good luck in the house cleaning endeavors! I'll do my part.

[Joanne ~ Spud*]

You just got here David.  A few of us have been hanging out a long time and just need to clean up our drawers and closets.  Please, add your pics!

[Adina P]

Exactly.  He has no house to clean yet ;-)  I think he just means that he will do his part by only uploading re-sized photos :-)

[Gracie, Jade, & Barkley]

I deleted some of my photos, but what about photos in threads - like attachments or sometimes the photos are reposted in the thread out of courtesy?

[Adina P]

All of those take up space, yes.  But that seems like a bigger job that would have to be a last resort.  It kind of destroys the discussion if the photos being commented on are go missing.

[F, Calla & Luca]

One album's worth gone!

[Leslie, Yogi & Maci Bear]

Got rid of my music. Maybe just take that option away?

[F, Calla & Luca]

I like that idea.

[Adina P]

We probably will, but I want to make sure music gets deleted first.  If I take away the option, then nobody will be able to reach their music to delete it.  The music doesn't really get 'deleted' just tucked away.

[Camilla and Darwin]

Just an FYI - when you delete your photos it takes away your DK points. Just thought some people would want to know. I was curious so I recorded my previous points and then compared just now after deleting everything. I went from 96,364 to 91,829. Not that it matters, but maybe it matters? He he

[Adina P]

Ugh that's so wrong.  At least most of the people who care about points are already well past HDA status :-)

[Camilla and Darwin]

Yeah, it doesn't make a difference to me but it might to some of the newer members who are trying to get to HDA status.