I, and several others, no longer think that a mere 400kb size limit for screenshots and GIFs when uploading a file to the Archives is nearly enough anymore. For monochrome screenshots, the size limit is OK. However, as far as I know, the limit has not been changed to accommodate for the higher resolution and color display of the C(S)E. This is quite annoying when attempting to upload files, an example is one of my uploads has been rejected twice just because my only screenshot (a 30 second at 7fps GIF) was far to large in file size to be allowed. Even after optimizing, removing every other frame, and seriously reducing the quality; my GIF is barely small enough to be accepted.

As for the idea allowed file size, that is, of course, debatable.
Personally I think that doubling the allowed size would nice however a full megabyte would be ideal.

Let me bring in some counterarguments:
1) We do not have infinity disk spaces, so larger screenshots might result in a full disk, as you can already see here: https://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14390
2) CEmu has APNG recording; a recording of exactly 60 seconds results in an animated png of 115kB. Therefor, you should be able to upload a screenshot of 3.5 minutes which is clearly enough.
3) You just have the wrong settings if a GIF file is more than 400kB, or it's just too long. Nobody is going to watch a GIF of 2 minutes to see the entire source or whatever

Personally I don't see why this limit needs to be raised. Of course there are exceptions, for example if you have a computer program (level editor) with only 1 screenshot which is 1MB, then it would be fine. Just use the right settings

For most programs, you can safely scale down to 1/2 resolution and it'll still be OK.

Before uploading GIF's anywhere, I use some GIF compression websites to do some GIF optimizations, and then (if needed) I will do some light lossy compression.

For my CC21 gif, which was crazy huge, I had to scale down, drop every other frame, and do some crazy lossy compression. That's why the GIF on the downloads page looks like crap.

You can blame me for that crap screenshot recording.
I'd probably always use CEmu for recording, but since it's been acting up, I haven't used it since. It was fixed, but I haven't had something to record. The original was over a megabyte, IIRC, and it was just an APNG that got converted to GIF. It wasn't even that long. A larger size limit would be nice, but it's not really necessary for reasons stated above. Easy to compress, shouldn't be that large, and others.

Yeah; if you stare at a blank OS screen. Come on man, actually do some testing

I vote that we (a) fire all the admins, myself included, and (b) leave the screenshot size limit exactly where it is.

According to the Cemetech Twitter Bot, there are 1648 programs in the archive. If each program has 400 kB worth of screenshots (actually less), the total space used by screenshots would be (1648)(400 kB)=659.2 MB. Unless the server hard disk is very small for some reason, I believe that this is an almost negligible amount of storage space. If the limit were increased to 1 MB, there would still be less than 2 GB worth of screenshots on the server.

I believe the true limitation may be the bandwidth consumed by serving the screenshots to visitors. Doubling the allowed size of screenshots could double the data transfer requirement.

Fine, a non-troll-y post on this issue. The entire size of Cemetech's web / is under 1GB, and the databases for the Cemetech website itself are another few hundred MB on top of that. We certainly have orders of magnitude more available disk space than even an additional 2GB of screenshots, and plenty of bandwidth to serve 3x more screenshot data than we currently do. The current limits are set based on a few criteria, in order:

1. Concision: The point of a screenshot is to represent the functionality, gameplay, or features of a particular program. The point is not to be a trailer, a playthrough, or a tutorial. In addition, statistics show that visitors typically spend far less than the length of the average animated screenshot on an archives page, even one with screenshots, before either downloading a program or leaving the page. We therefore deduce that visitors want a short, concise impression of the program or game in question, from which they decide whether to download the program/game.
   
2. Load Time: Cemetech's non-member visitors tend to fall lower on the spectrum of machine specs than the average internet user. Why? They're often students or teachers, accessing the site from phones, school computers, home computers, or school-issued laptops. A lighter page that loads faster is preferred for the site to be responsive for these users.
   
3. Bandwidth and Disk Space: Yes, these are part of it. We're a community built around wringing the last bit of functionality from devices with 24KB (or 155KB) of RAM. Wasting bandwidth and disk space on unnecessary media is anathema to that foundation. On the whole, our administrative staff also first began building websites when disks, bandwidth, and browser capabilities were more constrained, and we (especially I) tend to carry that conservatism into the current state of the website.

These are very good and valid points for restricting the size of screenshots. In this case I believe the concern is mainly about the first point in relation to color calculators:



The TI-84 Plus CE screen has 12.5 times the number of pixels in the TI-84 Plus screen. All things being equal, the maximum length of a screenshot for the TI-84+CE is only 8% that of a screenshot for the TI-84+. In this case, I would propose that the size limit be based on the program's category.

Note: I am not suggesting that the limit actually needs to be increased. I was able to upload a sufficient animated screenshot for FlowCE without any issues. Except for certain rare cases, the current limit is probably fine.

Yeah viva democracy!