DaD - Now what?

[Blue Rover]

I might be able to be the 'update guy'. i have way to much free time without base ball or school and even then i still have to much time on my hands on the weekends. i need to put it to use some where and the DaD is a good place to put it to.

[renamonfan]

How about uploading art to image-shack.us? Each artist can create a (free) account and upload their artwork, then copy/paste the HTML code it gives for the automatically generated thumb-nails.
Makes updating much easier since it's just a bunch of links to copy/paste in, could even be automated with a moderator instead to make it even easier.

[Lukos]

I'd be more than happy to be the update dude. I can keep updates pretty regular, and I do fairly well with HTML. It's simple. And if I can have a few things explained to me, I can do admin as well, if it's necessary.

[The Infamous Boss Reo]

I'd also like to volunteer for updating. Also, for a three-person team, might i suggest establishing a communication via AIM perhaps, and have scheduled meetings at least twice a month to make sure everything's on the up and up?

[Sonimon]

Image-shack doesn't allow hotlinking, so all images would turn to anti-hotlink images. Also, they don't allow porn anyway.

If you're going to do a communication, you'll need a lot more than once every other week. You'll need to know who is uploading what and when and everyone will need to be informed of the new updates so they don't accidentally overwrite new work that's been uploaded by someone else with an old .htm page.

To give you an idea of how long an update takes, especially if you leave it hanging for a week, prepare to set aside a good 4-5 hours of time. Plus, if I understand correctly, you'll be using raw html code and not frontpage which, unless you're slick with the language, means you should add on an extra hour to that. So you'll likely be looking at roughtly 5-6 hours every weekend. I'm not sure of all the nuances needed to run this site that can't be accounted for because of some sort of new feature that's been added since I was here or not, so those times are probably not accurate. Chibi, I'd recommend you let people know, more accurately than I can, approximately how long this takes YOU to do on a weekly basis so people will know what they're getting into.

Also, please be warned that if you're about to type something in like, "I'm webmastering like three sites currently and it's not that hard. I'm sure I could squeeze the DaD in :)" please reconsider. It's a hell of a lot more work than it looks and I'm sure Chibi is looking for a real replacement who won't fall apart after a couple of weeks.
Soni

[Lukos]

Hey, I've got time. Plus, it may not be all that hard. I've only worked with raw HTML so far, and I used a copy-and-paste-and-edit method. So it may actually be shorter for me.

[Anonmon]

I can add my own techie skills, which gives us about four or five of those... It's looking as though there's a bunch of people able to actually do a lot of the website stuff necessary to keep the DaD going, and several people have pledged donations. It's actually looking pretty good in my opinion, worst case scenario is the site goes down, 2nd worst is that we have to keep it up with no art, and 3rd worst (in opinion or lack of funding) is having to offload the art to either an offsite host or peer-to-peer distribution. In any case, I only see one scenario where we completely fail to keep anything up. So what we need most is more people giving money, or something else (is there anything?) that could help ease the financial burdens of keeping the site up.

To use PayPal you need a checking account, don't you? Still, my bank account is running pretty thin due to expensive expenses (around a $200 unavoidable withdrawal). Now that I'm 16 I can get an account my parents will have no power over, so once I do that and have a job (and if PayPal takes savings accounts) I'll set an account up.

'm not positive, but I think people would probably disagree with having their work bittorentized. Kinda like offsite hosting: it's less costly to the site, but it makes people feel foolish about being part of a site when they're not really part of it. Also, it's rough as it is to find a hosting site that will allow this sort of content even though it's legal. BitTorrent would work since it's not technically being hosted by any one particular site, but that means that some new artwork would come in slower than others or not available at all. It IS an interesting concept, though.

To know what the artists think we should actually ask them. I was actually thinking that the DaD site itself would seed the downloads so there's always at least one place to get them from (is that possible? Probably not given paid hosting people.), and then when someone got the *.torrent file off of DaD it would find the files on random people's computers + DaD itself + website lurkers. The real problem would be getting a bunch of people/computers dedicated enough to torrenting that the pics could always be up somewhere. The idea of having the site seed comes from my (mis?)conception that harddrive space is cheap, but bandwidth is expensive. Therefore, distribute the bandwidth load but let the site keep some HD space to seed with. Or something.

[Sonimon]

Well, you are correct regarding the bandwidth > $ than webspace, but peer-to-peer leaves a GREAT deal of room for art theives or people stealing artwork. Plus, if people just wanted to see one single new pic, they'd have to re-download the entire archive. I think people would get annoyed at that. This would be especially true of one of the more prolific artists like Acchan or AGZ.

To do this, would have to require permission from the artists themselves since having one's work hosted through a peer-to-peer deal is a big change. And good luck tracking down ALL of the artists who have work up. This would mean that only the people you could contact could get their work up and everyone else would have to, by default, have their stuff no longer available. So this plan would reduce the number of artists currently (.... well, okay, since the art section is down right now, "currently" isn't the best word.) available.
Soni

[Lukos]

I'm not exactly sure if this has been mentioned, and I'm not too familiar with bittorrent, so forgive me if I'm saying something that someone already mentioned. What if we just put the art on an ftp server? The password could be posted on the main site, since it's a public thing.

Then again, there's always therisk of people who hack through an ftp server, and that leaves room for stolen art.... Well, I'm sure we'll think of something.

[Sonimon]

Well, basically it works like this: http is like the front door to a site and ftp is like the back door. If you were going to upload all the files to an ftp server, you might as well upload the .htm and .html files so that people can simply access it through a front door. And if you have that option, then that means you've basically found a new place to host the site, so why not move the stories and everything else in along with the pictures.

Now if you're referring to having individual people host the images on their computers using an ftp program, what you're talking about is having a group of people be art section mirrors. And THAT means that each mirror would have to be updated individually. This was an option I went with as assistant webmaster for the DaD. In fact, Kazul, who later became the picture uploader, started off as one of the guys who had a mirror of the domain's picture section. This option turned out badly because mirrors started dropping off of the map when people got tired of hosting the domain's pictures and having their internet connections slowed down so much. As mirrors went down, the ones who stayed got all of the traffic and had to shut down too from overload. Offsite linking is, in general, a bad idea when you're dealing with this much content and with this many visitors.
Soni