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New SkirtCafe Photo Gallery

Posted: Fri Sep 08, 2006 1:46 am
by Bob
I have created a new SkirtCafe photo gallery; see the "Photos (new)" link up top.

If you would like to post pictures, please register on the gallery using your SkirtCafe username. I will then active it within a day or two. Alternately, you can PM me. Either way, you will get your own album on which to post photos.

All uploaded material must be family friendly, and should also pertain to the topic of skirts and kilts for men. For now, there is a disk quota of 30Mb per member; it is suggested that you do not upload full-resolution images, but rather reduce them to screen resolution before uploading.

The old MUG shot gallery is still available; there's a link to it from the new gallery. With the change from Tom's Cafe to Skirt Cafe, I felt it was time for a fresh start with photos as well. But if you have a photo there you'd like to move over, by all means, go ahead and do it.

Enjoy!

Posted: Sat Dec 08, 2007 11:15 pm
by knickerless
Am I missing something?

What happened to the photo gallery?



Nick

Posted: Sun Dec 09, 2007 12:06 am
by crfriend
knickerless wrote:Am I missing something?

What happened to the photo gallery?
You're not missing anything; it's just not there.

The old "photo gallery" (aka MUGshots) used to be there before SkirtCafe switched from vBulletin to the phpBB software it runs now. I suppose it's time for the administrative staff to consider lighting up a new gallery, and I shall bring the topic up to the Server Boss (even if he's already seen this).

I rather miss the "MUG shots" notion. Not only was it a place to stash photos larger than work as avatars, but it's a wickedly funny play on the entire term of "mug shot" as used in common parlance. (If you haven't guessed, I love wordplay, but tend to be outside the bounds of "political correctness" most of the time when I'm engaging in it.)

Posted: Sun Dec 09, 2007 1:06 am
by SkirtDude
Deleted.

Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2007 5:45 am
by Bob
The gallery had problems because it was kind of a separate system from the bulletin board. It was difficult to use, and was not used.

With the functionality to post images in this software, we're considering making a forum for MUGshots. We'd probably have special rules in the forum, such as:

1. Each "gallery" would be a thread. So, please start a thread with your own name.

2. Don't post on other peoples' threads, that is their gallery.

Any thoughts?

Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2007 1:42 pm
by SkirtDude
Deleted.

Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2007 2:33 pm
by Bob
Good question. Maybe we need two sections. Any ideas?

Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2007 2:52 pm
by crfriend
My personal preference would be to have the "Photo Forum" ("Phorum"? ;) ) members-only, at least initially.

Skirt Dude brings up a valid point in that whatever we put in there will be available via a Google (or Google-style) search, will be subject to random scannings and slurpings, and could prove to be a general nuisance to our lives (e.g. prospective, and narrow-minded, employers) as we wander our way through them. On the other hand, if what we put up is well and tastefully done, it could be a benefit.

Personally, most of my photos are what could be charitably called "engineering imagery" in that they were taken primarily so I could get an idea of what an outfit looks like "at range"; they're not intended to be artful or otherwise "easy on the eye", and that's what we'd need for a publically-facing photo gallery. Ideally, stuff in a public gallery would be professionally taken with proper backdrops and whatnot. Jan (kiltair) did just that with some of the works on his website.

Privacy

Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2007 2:58 pm
by JRMILLER
Guys,
I would prefer the photo area to be private -- that is, outside of the reach of web crawlers. I don't think it does any of us any good if crawlers find post our photos "out of context".

Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2007 3:26 pm
by HockeySkirt
With respect to the search engines, like Google and Yahoo, this can be solved by using a "robots.txt" file. The major search engines look for a robots.txt file on each web site to see if there are any instructions provided in it regarding which areas of the website should not be spidered.

This is not perfect, however, as though it would stop the images being copied by Google/Yahoo, you'd still want them to spider the discussion forums to hopefully encourage future visitors to come to the forum. So, though the images would not be spidered directly, Googlers might still work their way to this site, and thus its photos, unless those photos were private to registered members.

Ed

Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2007 3:52 am
by SkirtDude
Deleted.

Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2007 3:59 pm
by Bob
robots.txt is like placing a "Do Not Enter" sign on your front door. A password-protected private forum is like putting a lock on it.

Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2007 4:23 pm
by crfriend
Bob wrote:robots.txt is like placing a "Do Not Enter" sign on your front door. A password-protected private forum is like putting a lock on it.
From my experience, most spiders and crawlers don't come in through the front door, but rather through a side door or a window (via links to subsections of web pages that may not have a "robots.txt" file in their directories). Back when RCS/RI still had a web server of its own, we got quite a lot of crawler behaviour, sometimes in places where "robots.txt" files clearly marked things, "Do *NOT* index".

Completely spidering SkirtCafe would be a bit of a nuisance for most crawlers, anway, due to the way that pages here get generated "on the fly" from a database backend. There might not be much of relevance on the indexing machine, per se, but if it piqued a human's curiosity (an ex-spouse, a prospective employer, &c) that's where some damage could be done.

I still believe that a gallery should be members-only, at least initially; if we later decide to put a separate one up with professionally-done imagery, then we can make that one publically accessible.

Consider this

Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2007 4:59 pm
by JRMILLER
You know, we might consider a public folder and a private members only folder. The public folder is for anything you are willing to allow the general public to see "out of context" and private is for our own member shared "silliness", not for general consumption.

Thus, we may serve two purposes, one to put our best foot forward to the public and help further our agenda and another for some of the crazy things we wouldn't normally be caught dead in!

Re: Consider this

Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2007 4:18 am
by Skirt Chaser
JRMILLER wrote:You know, we might consider a public folder and a private members only folder. The public folder is for anything you are willing to allow the general public to see "out of context" and private is for our own member shared "silliness", not for general consumption.
Where is that thumbsup smiley when I need it? Both public and private photo journals would be ideal. I'm getting excited about a private photo area. While I don't know if Quiet Man would show up I bet I can wheedle permission to post myself. :D

Bob, you asked earlier about thoughts on the idea that each gallery is only for the original poster to post in. Comments can be part of the fun so perhaps people can have the option of putting something like "responses welcome" in their title.

Quiet Mouse