For many years Arnold_Winkelried had a picture gallery of Dopers. While he quit posting in 2012, he had been updating it up until at least January 2020. Today I found it no longer exists. Is it lost forever, or moved, or maybe someone else took over?
Nice find. Thank you.
Thanks! For some reason I never think to check the Wayback Machine when something like this comes up.
Thank you for that, GreenWyvern. It’s been years since I saw the gallery.
Should we attempt to rebuild something like this again?
See also this thread
~Max
Sorry, forgot about this thread.
You would need someone that is really willing to put in the time with it. As much as Arnold put into that site, a lot of it is really useless now compared to what people would expect it to be.
Many of the pics are of moved on or dead Dopers that a lot of current Dopers would not of heard of. That’s not bad in itself but the quality of the pics leave a lot to be desired. Many were taken on early cell phones or computer cams which are a lot different, quality wise, from today. Many are only thumbnail size, some are even smaller. Some are totally missing, just a guess that they were linked from peoples personal pages rather than actually hosted on Arnold’s site and the people have since deleted them. The bulk of the pics seem to be from 2008 to 2011.
Basically, you would need someone to volunteer their time, money and effort to get the site started. Then you would need a way to make sure new Dopers are aware of the picture site so they can get their photos added as they come onboard, otherwise you would just end up with another site that only had posters from the big kickoff and new posters wouldn’t know anything about it.
I don’t know anything about hosting a picture site, but maybe it would be better if once it was set up people could add their own pictures. I see a couple of drawbacks to that, but it would make it less work for whoever sets up the site.
If you have a facebook account, there’s a group for members of this site.
Although, don’t look now, Facebook is offline. It’s all over the news.
~Max
I’m not sure that an actual picture gallery is needed since we have Discourse. You can upload pictures to your profile. In addition to the avatar image, there is also Profile Header and User Card Background. Go to Preferences->Profile for these fields. That may not be as convenient as picture gallery, but it doesn’t require any external service or someone to administer it.
… says the guy with a hidden profile! 
True, but I don’t necessarily see that as a problem. I would guess that people with a hidden profile aren’t going to be the type of people who upload pictures to a picture gallery anyway. And, like I assume with yours, my avatar picture is basically what I look like anyway.
Only more handsome, I’m sure!
So we have to go clicking randomly on hundreds of user profiles in the hope that a few of them may have uploaded a picture? Your idea is a non-starter.
I guess I wasn’t thinking of the gallery that way. I was thinking that people used the gallery when they wanted to know what a specific poster looked like. I guess if they are using it more to peruse what everyone looks like, then the gallery makes more sense.
I forgot about this since I’m not a Facebooker. Last time I looked it was pretty sparsely populated, how is it now?
You’d know this better than me but didn’t OpalCat’s mom close down her websites?
I tried to bulk download the pics from Arnold’s site but no luck. I got a more computer savvy friend to try and he was successful so I have all those pics in case someone wants to start a gallery page. Conversely, if anyone wants their picture deleted, maybe because it portrays drunken debauchery, just let me know and it’s gone.
Also, I took a look thru Opalcat’s and The Straight Dope People Pages sites from the wayback machine and all the folders are empty, no pics at all. Whether the originals were deleted sometime in the past or the wayback machine just didn’t save them I don’t know.
Edit: Now I see I lied. There are a couple of files on the People Pages site tho most are empty.
Dang, that gallery is full of names I remember well but haven’t seen in many years.
There are a 100-200, maybe? And, yeah, Opal’s mother did shut down her site a year or two after she died.
How about imgur? I don’t know much about it, other than it’s a photo share place for Reddit (and others), but could it be used somehow as a gallery for SDMB users who wish to share photos of themselves? That way, it’s opt-in, and the platform is already established (no one has to do more work). Not sure it can be used that way, tho.
It’s weird when you think “Wow, I haven’t seen that guy in ten years” and you look him up and it’s closer to twenty. Time flies.
Is it a private page or can I check it out? That’s probably close to how many people that we have right now that post frequently.
I brought that up earlier but the big drawback is that anyone could post anything. We would probably end up with 10 Doper pics and 1,000 of whatever the current equivalent of goatse is. 