Please 

While I have no doubt there are optimisations can always be improved in areas, I think looking at a 0.1mb file these days is probably no one that is going to give you any huge improvement

34 minutes ago, Marc Stridgen said:

While I have no doubt there are optimisations can always be improved in areas, I think looking at a 0.1mb file these days is probably no one that is going to give you any huge improvement

Hello from mobile users and non-US places. We exist. Yes, even a fraction of a megabyte makes a lot of difference for us, in terms of both speed and internet cost.

For clubs, it's 300+ kB, while it could be less than 1 KiB when implemented as SVG, is totally worth changing.

P.S. I like how you rounded 181 kB to 0.1 MB 

Edited July 3, 2024Jul 3 by aia

I thought one of the major reasons for a major update to the visual interface was to be faster, leaner, and offer more options than ever before. "If" an .svg version of a graphic file can be reduced as much as @aia claims than it would meet all three of the criteria I mentioned earlier.  I am not sure why it hasn't been included up to this point (It has been around for 25 years) or being talked about being added at some future point in time.

You might as well go even further and ask for it to be a plain color background by default with always the possibility of adding an image.

14 minutes ago, SoloInter said:

You might as well go even further and ask for it to be a plain color background by default with always the possibility of adding an image.

Tbh, it would be a nice option for those, who do not need these patterns. But also, if they want to have some pattern there, why not? If it weighs less than 1kb, it's not a problem at all. With SVG, they can also add more of different unique or even dynamic patterns while keeping the filesize in a reasonable range.

It's only a problem when meaningless image weighs more than the page itself 

Edited July 3, 2024Jul 3 by aia

However it seems to me that all it would take is an FTP connection and an image with the same name and the same extension to replace the one provided by default. You would then have a basic image according to your wishes.

We might also have an option somewhere in the Admin to replace this base image.

This is on my todo list, and has been for a while. Consider it fixed for version 5.

Also, please make it less ugly, thanks. :D

One of our skin customizations removes this block entirely if the user has not set a background.

Edited July 11, 2024Jul 11 by Interferon

The fallback image is now customizable in v5 and the entire image cell can be removed with CSS if no user-uploaded image exists.

9 hours ago, Ehren said:

entire image cell can be removed with CSS

*Hidden, not removed. You can't remove things with CSS. Any removal for performance goals should be done at the PHP level, before transmitting HTML to the user. Otherwise, it will not solve the problem.

25 minutes ago, aia said:

*Hidden, not removed. You can't remove things with CSS. Any removal for performance goals should be done at the PHP level, before transmitting HTML to the user. Otherwise, it will not solve the problem.

Its already been stated by Ehren that its on his todo list to optimise this and the image itself is customisable, so you could make it as small as you wanted. If you wanted to remove it however, then CSS would be the way you would need to do it in 5. 

With the amount of code and user generated content transferred on each page load, the removal of the image HTML (a few bytes at most) would be infinitely negligible in terms of performance gains. You wouldn’t see a single point improvement in any page speed test by doing that.

You even mentioned yourself that less than a kb is not a problem at all. 

On 7/4/2024 at 12:35 AM, aia said:

If it weighs less than 1kb, it's not a problem at all.

I’m very, very particular about performance and excessive code, but would happily apply the CSS solution on all of my own sites if I needed to remove the thumbnails for some reason.