Thinking about using something unknown to me such as Imgur for hosting makes me procrastinate: “Argh! I gotta figure out how to set up the account, then figure out how to upload, tweak all kinds of weird settings, then figure out how to link without making a fool of myself, then …”
Now, if there were a simple set of instructions for the noob saying:
Go to Imgur (link)…
Create an account with these simple steps…
(steps, with good privacy and security default settings that can be trusted to be safe)
Follow these instructions to upload your cat images…
(foolproof steps to get photos there, with no need to worry about decisions like gallery names or other froufrou)
Follow these instructions to post a link to your image here
(simple cookbook steps)
That would be pretty darned cool and would lower the barrier to entry quite a bit. Meanwhile, the can of worms about hosting sketchy images here would remain unopened.
Has a kind and knowledgeable person written such a set of instructions?
Note: the key is a Straight-Dope-specific set of instructions, not just a general how-to doc from the Internet.
Adding a photo to a phone generated email is cumbersome. I don’t actually remember how to do it. But on the computer I can just grab the photo from the email from myself, and paste it into a new email. Also, assuming I want to say something in the email, it’s a whole lot easier to type on my computer keyboard than the phone.
Generally speaking, if the graph (or any image) is already online at another site, it DOES have a URL – that’s how your browser is able to load it for you to see, after all.
So sometimes you can just right-click on that image and either say “copy image address”, or “open image in new tab”, and then copy the URL from its address bar there (if you want to verify that it’s the right image first).
However, it won’t always be that easy. You can’t do that from a PDF, for example. Or if the site is purposely copy-protected (it might prohibit right click, or go through some effort to obfuscate the original image URL because they don’t want you to be able to share/steal it easily). There are ways around that, but generally it’s not worth the effort.
Personally, I use CleanShot, a (Mac-only) app that automatically uploads screenshots to its own image host and then provides a URL to paste. Makes the process easier, but still not as simple as just pasting into Discourse. And I don’t know if there is a similarly easy-to-use app on Windows
Well, you normally wouldn’t have to. Like on Discourse forums where images are enabled, you can just drag and drop an image, copy and paste it, upload it directly from your phone into a post, etc.
It’s because we don’t want to anger TPTB that we have to jump through a few extra hoops here.
I haven’t found a good general-use one either, which is part the reason I am asking about this.
I wonder… would there be any interest in a SDMB-specific image sharing site? I have some ideas about how to set such a thing up (without having to alter anything on the forum), and I don’t think it would cost terribly much. It’s something I might explore as a side project if there’s any demand for such a thing here. If not, that’s fine too.
Not quite… it’s just all the pictures in that one post. For example, if you go to Air Theme - #551 by CocoQuark - Theme - Discourse Meta and click on that “I see, thank you” picture by “Film Fugitives”, only that one opens in the lightbox. It doesn’t show any of the other images from other posts in that thread (such as post #1, which will let you scroll through the half dozen images in that post).
The Sun-Times has been struggling for decades, and has churned through a number of ownership changes. For the past couple of years, it’s been owned by the parent organization which also operates Chicago’s NPR station.
The financial struggles of TPTB are intimately relevant to rhis discussion.
AFAIK, this Discourse is hosted in Discourse’s systems. Everything we need, TPTB has to pay Discourse for on an ongoing basis. This includes storage. We already use a lot because of a 25-year history of posts. There is absolutely no appetite to pay so much more for image storage when there are so many alternatives which cost the ongoing operations nothing.
Hmm, I didn’t realize this was hosted on Discourse.com. That does make it more challenging. It would be a lot cheaper to host elsewhere (a LOT cheaper – Discourse charges $50/20GB, which is kind of insane… it would be like 30 cents elsewhere), but of course that would also entail more maintenance, etc. Anyhow, this would be a simple problem to solve if the SDMB were a regular business (or independent entity with decision-making power about its own future), but not in its current limbo.
I’ve run a few forums elsewhere, including Discourse, so I know this is entirely possible to do. But those other orgs don’t have a weird relationship with their TPTB =/
But it’s still the case that hosting one image consumes the same storage as does hosting ~1000 or 5000 posts. As big as our 25 year legacy is, it would not be implausible for a few weeks of images (or worse yet vids) to swamp the storage costs of 25 years of text-only posts.
There is a built-in file size limit and/or you can prohibit videos. And storage gets cheaper over time. I think if we really sat down and did the math, we could estimate how much it’d cost based on visitation and current amount of image links posted per day, and then add some safety buffer of maybe an order of magnitude or two. It’s probably going to still end up being very reasonable (if self-hosted elsewhere). The SDMB is old but relatively niche. My off-the-cuff guess is that it would cost less than $50/mo, maybe $100 if it got explosively popular, but I don’t think so. Can’t really be sure without the numbers, but I’m reasonably confident it wouldn’t be very expensive. I’ve run bigger sites with a ton more images, and it can be very cheap with a CDN and either cheap cloud storage or a colo – but that introduces more fragility in terms of “now you need someone to play sysadmin”, which may be a dealbreaker even if it were a volunteer position.
But shrug. All of that is moot if we don’t want to be put under a magnifying glass for TPTB (a sentiment which I entirely understand and agree with). I just think the technical/financial hurdles are much simpler than the bureaucratic/political ones, in our case.
I’ve been out of the web biz for 15+ years now, so I certainly defer to your current expertise. But I have no doubt the above is dead-nuts accurate.
It would be interesting to pencil out what it would cost all-in to cloud-host SDMB other than at Discourse.com in the current text only mode or with pix or even with pix + very short vids.
Somebody would have to shoulder Sysadmin duties, but once everything was running, there’s not that much to do other than respond to failures.
My gut is that we could hire a pro sysadmin outfit on an on-call per-hour basis, accept a couple hours’ response time and hence downtime when a failure does occur, and host the place for a year for a few thousand dollars.
Call it $5K for concreteness. Invite 10 of our wealthier members to each donate $500/year =$60/mo to the cause. Done.
Not that I’m pushing for any sort of action right now, but if we wanted an estimate for the future… just in case… I’d be happy to run those numbers if anyone can get me the visitation stats. I can try to roughly estimate it based on the thread activity I personally see, but that’s not very scientific. And I doubt a few days in late January would be very representative of annual visitation anyway.
I would also be happy to volunteer labor to help migrate & maintain the thing, but realistically, it’s best not to rely on a single individual or two for something like this, if only for the “hit by a bus” factor. Ideally there would be the forum equivalent of “designated survivors”, i.e., sure, someone could be responsible for the month-to-month maintenance (actually quarterly is probably fine), but there should be a plan in place in case of a sustained outage while the usual person isn’t available. Unfortunately, that’s the kind of thing that’s much harder to set up and maintain than to just pay Discourse.com $100-$500 a month (not sure which plan we’re on).
Back in the Chicago Reader days, before Discourse, didn’t we actually have admins who managed the PHP and admin side of things? I do remember occasional outages then, but nothing too terrible. Whatever happened to them? (Sorry, I can’t remember exactly who they were…)
Of course, right now this is all just fantasy given the situation at hand. But if anyone wanted the numbers just for fun, I’d be happy to try estimating some if we can get some stats. I suspect it can be done for quite a bit less than $5k/year. (And in this alternate reality, if we could get that much and the costs aren’t that high, maybe we could even disable ads altogether, etc. Nice to dream.)
