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@Velocio
I forgot I had this thread... perfect place for it though.
Members get the randomised headers.
Non-members get one pre-chosen header... the blur one:
http://www.londonfgss.com/images/londonfgss/header_blur.jpg
The reason for this is bandwidth.
Each image is 50KB > 90KB, which is fine if you're visiting the site repeatedly as the images get cached by your browser and you only ever get them from the server once so it costs us very little to have many headers.
For guests, and they make up 70% of visitors to the site, they don't really come back frequently and so with 12 possible images we could have served 1MB to each visitor, and there are thousands of visitors. And because they don't come back frequently, no useful caching occurs so we serve this over and over.
So guests now get just the one header, and that means we serve only 50KB rather than a potential 1MB per visitor. It also means that the key caching servers within an ISP cache one file with a higher priority than many low priority files... so it should prevent some requests from reaching this server.
I'm worrying about bandwidth because of two things: 1) The money from T-shirts isn't going to last forever. 2) The pound sliding against the dollar is making that money burn faster than is desirable... we're going to run out of money sooner than I anticipated.
That said, the money from advertising (to non-members) is currently delaying my coming cap in hand to you guys, as that has helped make the kitty last longer than it would've done.