Website thoughts and ideas...

[Rick]

If you've got ideas about ways we could update the OAS website, please tell us about them.

[JohnP]

Hi Rick,

I've always found submitting images to the Gallery a complicated & long procedure (which is why I don't do many) - Is there anyway members could submit images themselves....? I participate in some photograph forums & you can do this - it would also save you a lot of work.

Also layout of Gallery is a bit confusing - Not quite sure why there is a gallery & a gallery archive - It makes it tricky looking for the new images.. for example Latest additions are in the Gallery Archive - wouldn't it better to have a direct link to the latest images.....

Can you improve the security of the Forum - i.e. make it members only - again many of the forums I participate in do this & it only normally takes an hour or two to register...

Cheers,  John

[Mike]

I agree with all of John's comments. I would also like to see a "search" function for gallery images. I was trying to find an old image myself the other day and it took ages to find it.

[Tony G]

Hi all

maybe a small classified section where members can advertise equipment they are selling or items required that other can point them in the right direction so they can purchase it.

Tony G

[Rick]

The gallery in two places issue is one a bigger server is intended to solve. The whole gallery is way too big to fit on my ISP's homepages server, so I put the archive on my own machine at home. I occasionally shuffle the images about a bit so that new ones get onto the main site, but must confess I've not been keeping up with this so well. However I didn't want to cut out the small bit of gallery on the main site altogether, because the link to my home system is not high-capacity or high-availability.

Is it really too complicated to ask people to put an image in an email and include a little information about it? I wouldn't see a problem with established gallery contributors having their own IDs to allow them to add images to the gallery, but I would expect new contributors to use a system at least a bit like the one we currently use for their first few images, and I'd expect there to be some editorial control over what goes in and how it is displayed.

What benefits do you see in having the forum available to members only? What problems does having it open cause?

[Whitters]

Having an open forum is a great benefit to the society, many people have sited the forum and the web site as reasons for finding and joining the society. I think that we should have some areas restricted but the majority of the forum should be open.

[Mike]

I agree.

[JohnP]

My thoughts regarding the security issue was that it would stop the ocassional spammers which I know the OAS site has had trouble with recently.. I know that this isn't a major problem but it may get worse if/ when you goto an external server. And secondly if you have to sign into the forum then you are already secure for uploading images etc. to the gallery (re: my original request about being able to submit images yourself). I would still argue that the current email method is too cumbersome & discourages people from submitting - also you have to wait for it to be posted until who ever is reponsible gets around to updating the page....

John

[Rick]

Earlier this week I turned on the option to make robotic registrations trickier, and for the moment that seems to have helped cut down the spammer activity.

Yep, it does take a while for me to sort out each gallery image; edit the description, pick a template, make a thumbnail, put it in the appropriate indices, and re-build the pages. A gallery package would do most of that easily enough, once configured.

I've always expected that members would have their own webspace for the bulk of their images, and that the OAS gallery would be a place for showing off a selection. I've never seen the website gallery as the primary place for members to host all their images. If it's likely to become a primary hosting place for all members images then we'll need to revise our expected space and bandrequirement upwards quite a bit...

[Mike]

Powweb provide 20Gb of space. I would have thought that would be plenty.

[Rick]

Yes, that sort of figure is fairly typical for US-based hosting companies. The catch is likely to be the bandwidth, though finding US-based companies offering 1Tb or more per month isn't that hard.

However, do we want the OAS to be provding its members' primary astro-image hosting facility, or is it reasonable to expect at least the more prolific imaging folk to have their own webspace for the bulk of their images? (Obviously folk who only have a few astro-images may well not want the trouble of their own webspace, and it's not unreasonable for the OAS to be hosting them all...)

(...and should we move this conversation into "Behind the Scenes"?)

[Fay]

How about "Image of the Month" for members only?


PS Obviously I will not be participating in this for about 5 years!!!
Fay

[JohnP]

Isn't latest post by ... Sutherland a classic example of why security should be improved....?

[Mike]

Yup

[Rocket Pooch]

Hi Folks,

To be completely honest I have not read through everything here, but it seems like the spammers problem still exists, oh well.  

In my offiic we run a portal product called DotNetNuke, it comes with several modules for forum's images news XML feeds etc etc.  We do not have a spammer problem because I have to authorise access before anyone can make a posting, unlike this site where you can post without getting approved.

The purpose of these free portal products is to build communities. I personally beleieve this is where we need to extend the site.  With our site any old monkey can update it given the right permissions and its really easy to add pages and features with little on no technical experiance.  So for example if we wanted to create a new Gallery, you just add the page and add the data, simple.

The only problem with what I use compaired to what the OAS guys are familure with is its .Net, but there are similar PHP versions.

See http://dotnetnuke.com/ this is built using the system,

Here is another example, I don't like the skin but its relevant
http://www.starryhost.com/

These sites are simple to setup, free, all we will need is a skin for it (Greg) and we can tailor it to our needs.  I can't help much with a PHP versions, but if we we're considering a .Net version then I do have people who could do the initial design if needed.

Chris