Hi guys, 

Geni brought up a good point that Media Viewer doesn’t provide a warning when users click to enlarge huge files (e.g.: 400 Mb) on our talk page:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer#Media_Viewer_Update:_First_Improvements

This is not a new issue, as this is the same functionality we have provided for years on the File: page. But Media Viewer makes it a lot easier for users to accidentally load a huge file. So I think we should seriously consider providing a warning, if it is easy to implement and if we can identify a threshold that is based on data and that is acceptable to our communities.

Do any of you have data on what the threshold might be for identifying file sizes that might crash your browser? Or do you know what best practices are on that point? It would be good if we could agree on a limit that is at least partly informed by data. 

If there is no reliable data or best practices, we might have to determine this threshold together arbitrarily, based on common sense. In that case, what do you think would be a reasonable threshold when we would start giving the warning? 50Mb or above? 100Mb or above?

For now, I just filed this ticket #933 to track this issue:

https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/multimedia/cards/933

Thanks for any recommendations you might have,


Fabrice

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Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation