@
Teasday
When I asked Holo yesterday he figured 20 would be good, if you want to convince him otherwise I'd suggest you do that. Just remember that we're trying to move away from people hammering away at the site and slowing things down with excessive requests, which is why it's kind of unfortunate that people are still going back to the legacy long strip instead suggesting ways to make the new reader work for them.
Nah, I actually think it's a good idea to keep the new reader as the default, with the same number of preload images as is or even lower, because as you mentioned, it should keep the site from bogging down; in theory at least. It should be fine for most users. I'm probably a unique case as most people I know either have fast or slow internet, but few rarely complain about high frequency of disconnections unless they live in the middle of nowhere, or limited to one ISP having a stranglehold monopoly in their area like they do in my area with aging infrastructure.
As for suggestions off of the top of my head:
I think the legacy reader should remain limited to exclusively registered users with their account, kind of like a more "premium" feature that's not available to casual guests (not unlike the surprisingly high number of apathetic people who still use Internet Explorer/Edge)...Forces them to get a foot through the door so to speak when they have an account. And the more engaged they are with the site and community, the more likely a reader would be inclined to support the site itself to keep feeding the hungry beast. I believe that's called a loss leader in retail business; operating on a negligible loss so that people come in for the deals, and stay for the rest.
Another would be to restrict the number of preload images during the peak traffic times when the site is most likely at a tipping point of going down, or when transitioning/adding to new images servers when the site gets
really bogged down and buggy, with the site often going down and up again when it gets bottle-necked.