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Re: Forum Photographs

Just a reminder about greedy photobucket and Forum pictures- not that many should need it.

The suggestion by Hugh sounds interesting if we can get hold of the missing pictures from some valuable early postings.

The comment about Pinterest postings also raises the question of any possible future changes here.

I hope not, but recent events make me a little concerned about these remote based storages.

Cheers, Tony.

Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Re: Forum Photographs

I think any Free service is going to be problematic as when their advertising model fails so does the service. I also think remote storage is fine as long as you are prepared to pay a fee for it. That said unfortunately I use Google and pay for it but it is not compatible with this forum.

Location: Rokeby, Victoria, Australia

Re: Forum Photographs

Not sure that paying for a service is a great help.

The club website used a paid for hosting by Ilysis which ran well for some years.

Recently Ilysis was taken over by Uber who were then bought by Netregistry who were bought by Melbourne IT.

During this waltz they changed a few things which effectively stopped the website working last year, taking many hours of phone calls over a few weeks to sort.

Finally it settled down until the next change which again took more hours on the phone to sort.

I suppose at least the system still runs which is more than can be said for the free photobucket!

Cheers, Tony.

Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Re: Forum Photographs

Might be worth mentioning that I help build very large websites for a living, last few jobs have been Guardian, Telegraph and currently at PhotoBox where we manage millions of images per day.

Some (boring) stuff to take into account that might help;

1. Remote photo hosting, I would suggest Flickr, it's big, has a decent service and is easy enough to share images from. I don't imagine it will will be failing any time soon! It maybe that once Ruaridh is back from his travels we update the image posting sticky post to reflect this, (or whatever choice is felt to be the best.)

2. Fixing the Bravenet "problem". This has been discussed ad infinitum and the "management" are apparently doing something. One thing it is worth knowing though is that at some point Bravenet implement a policy for every post that is added to the forum one will be deleted. Last time I had access to the numbers we were starting to get close to this limit.

3. Creating a "new" forum is relatively easy, IMHO best bet it to use one of the existing off the shelf solutions, (PHPBB etc.).
- Migrating the existing content is the hard bit, especially the task of attributing posts to the right people.
- To get the content you have to set "crawlers" to go and read and save each post and it's information, then reformat that for the new forum software and "post" it automatically. In theory part of this service could find the photobucket images and flag them up for moving / url changing but that would be a big piece of work!
- I have offered many times to host this and am happy to do it, but I don't want to be seen as leading a coups d'état!
- "Self hosting" the images is possible, but would need to keep an eye on how much space they take up, (even an Iphone image can be 18mb each).

4. Pinterest works in that it doesn't host the original image itself, (unless you directly upload). It makes a thumbnail and then links through to the original image.

Location: Buxted, East Sussex