Wouldn't you want to encourage (quality) uploads and discourage downloads. Its the uploads that drive people to the site generating interest and the potential of ad revenues. Its like a shop limiting you to buying only 10 items.

Is it possible to work out whether its actual image views or the attachment thumbs that's causing the issue. Some very long pages with lots of WIPs like tutorials take a while to load in and must be soaking up the bandwidth. Can you tell vBulletin to show the thumb attachments smaller or compress them more ? Or convert all those large inline thread images to attachments ?

What would be ideal is to have more than two levels of view. The mini thumbnail is too small to appraise somebody's map but then getting the full 2K square one in is also ridiculous most of the time. Ideally you want a smaller thumb - right down at the 128 pixel sort of size, a mid size which is about half a screen and then click for saving to HD sorta size which you could reserve for certain members - paid up, with a high enough submission to download ratio, or have a monthly bandwidth cap.

CGTextures have a daily download limit which works pretty well. Their textures are free which is why I support them and upload mine to the site but if your a paid member then you can go mad and download a lot more. Actually, thinking about it, they have a three tiered image res view too.

What I think Arcana needs to do is to figure out where its all going first of all. Presumably images. So are they inline or click through type ? Maybe up the max allowable size of JPG's and lower PNGs to reserve them for tokens and stuff. Ban BMPs and other uncompressed image types.

You can also tell apache to compress normal html and the web browsers should uncompress it on the fly. Sometimes that is turned off for compatibility with really old web browsers but that would make a difference too.

P.S. Like the new avatar Arcana - but then I liked the old one too.