new art

It most certainly

will!

Lemme break it down for ya.

I'll partner with an already established gallery and will help them

build art galleries. We might host the poetry.

We will also have albums for you to upload pictures.

It will

take me a bit of time to get all of this worked out, but I'm on it!

New Art
hi, checking

in. Love the partnering idea with another host site. You know, we COULD use msn.com for a site only of posted

images...

The main thing is, do we want jpg and bmp only or gif and the whole gamut of file extension varieties of

images?

And, we will still need to have some copyright info on the forum and in the host site. I still think this may

qualify as personal use, unless members must pay to suscribe. We may come up with a good copyright statement for this

purpose (I know some good msn.com sites in design, web, etc. that have some we may consider modelling on...).

The

other think on my mind is differentiating computer graphics/conceptual/whatever from "traditional arts" or traditional

"crafts". Big big differences! I think I could handle all three if called for...

MSN resizes and

shrinks all pictures anyway so the file format should be a big deal (though I'd obviously prefer jpegs for art).

The

copyright, privacy policy etc are all underway. If you'd like to contribute to those text please contact jespah.

Craven - trying this

feature out. Thanks for your quick reply.

I am wondering if you envision this forum staying as a 'free' or sort of

a 'not-for-profit' status site. If you added something like PayPal you could have a way to seek or accept donations for

paid hosting space for images on another site. This may help if many folks start using this feature - traffic and hits are a

biggie in counting the allowed space for 'free', so maybe this is a way we could just ask for a lil help?

I'm going to pay

for a paid host (this free host is just temporary) out of my pocket and run it at a loss. I have no intention to make any

money with this site.

I'll add a banner ad on the bottom that will help cover costs if traffic explodes and might add

a "donate through paypal" feature but I really have no intention of making money through this. If traffic and hosting gets

really expensive I'll just have to find ways to support this through a banner ad. The ways I will never ever use to cover

costs are things like selling the member database, that will be very clear in the privacy policy.

Members can help

with donations but I really don't want to go that route and probably won't spend any time implementing that feature, I'd

rather they just helped by clicking on a banner ad every now and then.

I might open a different site for me to make

money to cover hosting (something along the lines of a web development business) but I don't think the hosting will be a

problem for a while (unless I setup image and file uploads).

As to image hosting I will setup limited image hosting

but will wait to do this until I am back online (I will go offline for a few weeks when I move back to the states) since

that's a feature that can be abused (I can't give 100 mb of file space to every user).

If people are interested in

paid image hosting I might just set that up, but will always tell them that they can get it for free elsewhere.

As to

art image hosting maybe this will just be done by humans to avoid hosting problems. I'd give the art editor FTP access to a

folder and ask the ditor to put the images on the server so that the file size isn't abused.

Another possiblility is

the partnership with an established online/hardcopy art and poetry gallery. This might work out very well and I have to

explore these options when I have the time.

There are many little things to work out but they will have to wait

because I'm in a hurry to finish this site up before I move.

I'll announce a "feature freeze" soon but when I get

back online I'll start adding the features that members want.

Another option for

the art is to allow members to sell their art here. But that would involve more money issues than I care to think about. For

now I just want to make the best free site I can.

Sounds like you have

good plans, doable and everything Craven!

I do think that you could accept some assistance, in the way that NPR

(National Public Radio) does in the US. Everyso often they have a campaign to raise funds since it is mostly

listener-supported now instead of US government subsidized. But the good side is, it could be an innocuous "mention" in some

posts maybe, not a banner ad to donate. And, it could be only from the forums that image hosting is of particular importance.



In the meantime, I am thinking that you could get to the point to ask each forum editor to create or maintain a free

storage site for their forum. For instance, if it was done in a "locked" or "private" communit setting, it could be limited

to members of this forum, and only used by members of this forum. I may not have done a great job explaining this, but you

may get a few ideas here.

Yup, I understand

it. My only worry is about relying too much on humans. If things aren't automatic it's dependent on the time those humans

have.

I'm not too worried about it though, there will be an easy solution. I just have to wait on it until I have

more time (more about that when I post the "feature freeze" thread).

Okay, how do we download photos?
I'm not familiar with IMG nor URL to download images. How is that done? Can somebody provide a step-by-step instruction? c.i.

ci - go to the Forum Help forum. There is a tutorial on avatars and it will be of help re showing images.