Forums are on life support?

[donsladek]

Folks,

I found this editorial on the Stance is Everything Forum, and thought it might draw discussion about the status and future of Lotus Elan Central. I believe we have already seen the effects of changes in PhotoBucket.

Stance is Everything Forum Editorial

How do we keep LEC alive and thriving?

Cheers

[Giniw]

Well this forum is quite lively, isn't it?
The thing is, if you don't have anything special to share nor ask you do it on a "write only" social media, but if you are looking for informations the forums are so much better.
I think generalist forums are dying or more probably are already dead, but specialized forums like this one we have here on LEC are very much alive.

[Brit-Car-Nut]

With the change in photobucket's policy, like the article says many of our really helpful postings are now without their pictures except the banner from photobucket saying the pictures are being held hostage for a crazy annual fee.

Trying to figure out how to fix your window regulator / butterfly? That fantastic posting is now just a lot of words without corresponding pictures (a lot of pictures).

I can make that particular post available except for the movies because I grabbed it so I didn't have to go on the web every time I had a question ( I also have 15+ terabytes of storage on my home network, so I don't worry about running out of space.

I host my own sites and the cost is nowhere near photobucket's demands. All of my pictures, manuals and files are hosted on my own domains so until I stop paying for the 5 web sites I host, I am good for now.

I have tried to reach several of the more prolific solution posters who have been hit by photobucket to offer hosting of their articles and pictures but have not heard back.

It is a shame that greed and monetizing everything has become the Internet's only goal.

Until photobucket is sorted, everyone wanting to provide pictures should either host them themselves or upload them instead of linking them.

Within reason, anyone that has articles that have good pictures now stuck in photobucket, I will be willing to put them on my servers (if you email them to me) and give you the master link to fix your URLs. Something like LEChost/bill/pict#1.jpg so you would change photobucket/xxx/pict#1.jpg to have the new LEChost/bill instead of photobucket. That becomes a simple copy/cut and paste process.

[Giniw]

That is interesting (and nice of you). As I said in another thread the photos can be retrieved with a little script using wget (for instance). So that means anyone with an access to the php server could do that script, which would identify the posts containing photos hosted on photobucket, then upload them on another server (one of yours for instance) and then patch the posts with the new URLs.

[Brit-Car-Nut]

If you can make all of that happen, I can give you some space. I know just enough to keep things running so wouldn't trust myself to do more than offer assistance.

I don't know if it is possible, but maybe keep the photos or other content in sub folders unique to each contributor? I am assuming it will be a LOT of photos, so some way of organization would be helpful for the future?

There are some .mov files that would be nice to grab as well.

At some point, or even right now, LEC might want to put the files under their domain, so I would prefer to receive their blessing on a project like this as I don't want to appear to be looking for anything other than being helpful.

Let me know how I can help.

[Giniw]

I could probably do that little script if I had access to the web server or at least (and preferably ^^) a copy of the table which contains the posts.
Or just an example of a post that contains at least a link to photobucket in the exact format it's saved in the database.
Or I can even prototype something and then it would be adapted to the real formalism by whoever is in charge of the forum maintenance?
Well, basically it's almost already there: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=26159&p=332592#p332591

I don't know if it is possible, but maybe keep the photos or other content in sub folders unique to each contributor? I am assuming it will be a LOT of photos, so some way of organization would be helpful for the future?

Yes, and several files could share a common name too, so it would be safe to rename them properly, too. Not a problem either of course.

It seems there are not so much images hosted on photobucket (I was looking where I had read that and it appears it's you who wrote it viewtopic.php?f=12&t=26159&p=332592#p332587 )

[Brit-Car-Nut]

I looked at the photos posted by Specky in his "Door window fails to operate correctly. Diagnosis & Repair" post and like others, they have addresses like:
http://i615.photobucket.com/albums/tt23 ... hart-1.jpg

So I searched LEC on the basic core of the address (photobucket.com/albums) and got the count I listed. There are a LOT of pictures that are no longer the picture we want to see, rather the picture photobucket is displaying.

DON'T USE THE QUOTES. I used them to isolate the string as the search criteria from the actual posting.