Loosing Artwork / Media Repository

[maelstrom512]

What about the wiki? We are using MediaWiki wich could support this nicely. (Like http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page)

Or would this blow away the limit on the space / bandwidth we have?

Would it even be a viable solution?

[LonghornXtreme]

That's really not a bad system. I upped a small 128x128 png. This will work great for icons and other small images... in the future it probably won't do too well for say title screen images or race depictions or what not as it has a 1MB limit (or it automatically resizes 1MB images).

We need to get all the tech icons and other stuff upped to it...

Is there anything we need to do to make sure the photobucket repository still fits with the creative commons license?

EDIT: I was typing as the previous post was posted. I'm not too familiar with media wiki, I'd say that it would take a decent amount of moderation to prevent the a**jerks out there from abusing but it would probably be a good idea.

[marhawkman]

Any suggestions? We could of course make the userdata available on request only, but this would mean additional work.

To prevent vandalism I could mirror everything regulary on my HD or server.

that's not really hard. But it does require you to check things periodically. I did think of a nifty idea. Instead of posting the PW and account name for Photobucket, you could PM it to users who've got stuff to contribute.

As for the Mediawiki idea. You can set permissions on those.

[Geoff the Medio]

To prevent vandalism I could mirror everything regulary on my HD or server.

I'm not sure what kind of person will vandalize a photobucket account, but the problem might end up being more one of the time it would take you to keep fixing things than it would be any loss of data. Check the wiki logs (with show bots on) for example; we don't lose any wiki data, but the spam and vandals require persistant cleanup efforts.

Any suggestions? We could of course make the userdata available on request only, but this would mean additional work.

If you're going to make the user data request only, then people might as well just sign up for their own photobucket accounts, and link anything they think is worthwhile, and then you or another FO trusted user can do the uploading to the "official" account.

Alternatively, the suggestion to use the wiki in effectively the same manner might be better. We'd have to set things up so that not just anybody can upload stuff to the wiki (there are plenty of wiki spammers who use registered accounts to do so, and certainly we don't want unregistered users uploading). Rather, a wiki admin could upload images that are posted on the forums, and then they could be accessed and used just like the photobucket account ones. I'm a bit more inclined towards this solution because it keeps all the data in FO-controlled servers, and eliminates photobucket restrictions like max file sizes, and avoid any potential copyright issues...

[Tyreth]

I personally considered the wiki also. It would work well for the job, but I don't want every person to be able to upload files. Especially since we'd need to increase the file size.

The other thing with the wiki is that it might have a higher traffic rate than a password protected repository - and images can chew up bandwidth quickly.

[utilae]

Have images uploaded by the public to their own photobucket or whatever accounts.

Have mods upload from those (photobucket accounts) links considered worthy, to a server, that will store the media.

[mithro]

As I've said previously I can host quite a bit of stuff. As long as the traffic doesn't exceed about ~90Gb per month everything would be fine. Extra traffic above that I would to look into better hosting.

Personally, I would prefer people use something like Subversion (a revision control system) with something like WebSVN for online access.
The Wiki idea is also a good option. It allows you to store comments about the pictures with the pictures. You can set it up so that registerations have to be checked before you can upload/change stuff.

I would also like to see people puting up "works in progress", as they can
* often be reused at a later date for another purpose
* help budding artists learn how to create artwork
* show the thought process so people who can see why the artwork changed the way it did (ie not clear enough, to detailed, not detailed enough)

For example, as you get new technologies, previously unused icons could be used for the new technologies. It would also be helpful if a new artist was trying to create a technology icon and was able to see how the other changed so that he can create a new icon faster.

Mithro

[eleazar]

I think it would be very beneficial to the project to allow uploading of images to the forum. In orienting myself to the project i think i've seen more brokent links than pictures.

Alternatively Wesnoth has a script that scans the forums for new images, which it copies and uploades elsewhere sorting by author. Lots of developers have the rights to delete what's unusable, but anything that might be usuable is kept. Anybody can browse these images.