With Pholody, it is so easy to create photo slideshows that we get hundreds of slideshow works, along with tons of media files, poured on server every day. Surprisingly, quite a large part of them have never been played. Not even by the owner — they seem to be totally abandoned.
That was fine at the beginning. However, as Pholody's traffic scales up, it becomes a headache for us. Those works silently consume server storage, increase labor for maintenance, and slow down the whole site. Moreover, most of them are poorly made — who will enjoy a work that even the owner does not want to take one more look at? So we decided to make some change.
Effective from Jul 1, 2019, we will apply a Live Time property on all slideshow works. Here are basic concepts of Live Time.
- A slideshow has limited Live Time when created.
- Live Time will be extended to infinite if the slideshow gathers enough audience.
- Slideshow will be removed when Live Time ends.
In practice, all works will have 6 months (or 180 days, more exactly) Live Time when published. The Live Time extends to infinite if the work is viewed for at least 8 times.
Those do not meet such criteria will be automatically removed after 180 days.
Before removal, the owner will receive a reminding mail like below.
As noted in the mail, there will be 3 days before removal. During that period the owner should have enough time to make a copy by downloading it as mp4 video file.
After received the reminding mail, if go to account manage page, you will find a small piece of text under the title of corresponding work, showing how many days are left before removal.
To be fair, from now on, at the time of publish, the owner will receive a message showing estimated end of Live Time. Below is an example.
Note that this is default setting for all works, it can be easily extended by fulfilling the criteria described above.
- Once the reminding mail is delivered, the Live Time of corresponding work can't be extended even though it fulfilled above criteria afterward.
The Live Time property also applies on older slideshow works created so far. However, the removal action will not start till Jul 1, and there will always be 3 days after the reminding mail.
In conjunction with the introducing of Live Time, we will raise the limit of file sizes. Now you can have up to 150 images in a single slideshow, as well as a music file up to 12MB. Both are 50% up from previous version.
Happy Photo Slideshow!