Prototype Galleries?

[Phill Dyson]

Are all the Gallery's I made sticky to remain unsticky & disappear of the forum eventually?
I did ask for a 'Prototype Gallery' section at the time & was told no........would be a shame to loose these gallery's when members have taken the time & trouble to post them......well to some of us at least!

 

[adrian]

It is certainly NOT the intention that they disappear and I agree given the time and trouble that everyone has taken to post this information then we need to highlight it as best we can. As I have mentioned in the past the upgrade to the forum software means that I can add additional upgrades onto the system. One of them is a "resource manager" which I think will allow us to maintain and update not just these galleries but other useful resources as well. I've still a couple of tweaks to resolve but now that most of the issues with the forum upgrade have been sorted then I can start looking at how to manage the collections we have got, so watch this space.

 

[Phill Dyson]

These would be more usable in an separate Prototype Gallery section rather than burred among all the other galleries, hence me making them sticky in the first place, as this at least kept them at the top of the gallery section & thus visible, it also prevented them from dropping off the forum.

Why is it we can have seperate scale sections & not a seperate 'Prototype Gallery' section ?

It would be appreciated if you keep those of us who made contributions in the prototype gallery's & the rest of the membership as how & where you will preserve them ?

 

[adrian]

To be fair though we don't actually have separate scale sections in the gallery. There is one gallery section and that is it. The few separate areas for scales have been deliberately placed under the "Society News" area and not the gallery area.

I wouldn't rule it out without giving it due consideration but my main reservation is that I don't want it to end up be a general photo upload for everyone's entire photo collection, there are other sites like Flickr that are eminently more suitable. We are a predominately a modelling forum and in researching our models then useful photos with details not often photographed or different livery details are more than welcome as it's a great resource to have at our fingertips for the models we make.

As for the sticky vs dropping off the forum dilemma - that is the fundamental nature of forums. On the one hand we want to highlight some of the excellent modelling that goes on and make sure that it get's the acknowledgement it deserves but then again "one man's meat is another's poison", people have different tastes so do I have the right to decide what should be promoted or not? I'd say not, so we need to find some other way because on the other hand just making a lot of threads sticky is then a barrier to the new stuff coming through. How do we encourage new members to post their photo's if their thread immediately disappears onto the second page? The problem of sticky threads is we then get accused of being a clique. That's why I say it's a dilemma, now as far as I'm aware none of the other forums have solved this conundrum either, Andy Y has tried various solutions on RMWeb with blogs and other assorted ideas but in my opinion this isn't working either. If you know of a site that has solved it then please let me know - I have no problem with plagiarising good ideas.

I will be looking at the resource manager over the next few weeks and have no problem with reporting back as soon as I make any headway.

 

[flexible_coupling]

I reckon breaking up the galleries section a bit - at least, perhaps, an "Oldies" prototype sub-section (not with the slightest negative connotation!) - would make it a lot easier to navigate through.

 

[Simon]

I just don't think it's worth it, this is a forum and galleries is just a big old unwieldy pile of threads like any other, nothing is being "lost" it just might be a bit tricky to find it

Having had a quick look through, it could do with "weeding" and some posts removing (on the basis of admin's guidance in the first post on the forum) but it would be a huge amount of work and what would be gained - not a lot I think.

As Adrian says photographic repositories exist for any serious attempts at pictorial references on the web.

Simon

 

[adrian]

I reckon breaking up the galleries section a bit - at least, perhaps, an "Oldies" prototype sub-section (not with the slightest negative connotation!) - would make it a lot easier to navigate through.

For navigation then perhaps the following will help. It might have been there before but I can't honestly remember it anyway with the new forum software at the bottom of the section, e.g. galleries in the middle you can see a link for "thread display options" If you click on this then it expands to the filtering options where you can choose to display the threads by prefix. So set the prefix to Prototype, you can choose to sort by number of views, replies, likes etc.



If you then press the "set options" button you will get a list of just the prototype galleries, across the top you can see the bar for the filters that are applied. click on the little blue x to remove the filter and go back to the full list of galleries.



Obviously this is reliant on people applying the correct prefix when they create the thread. If you do happen to spot any missing prefixes then please let me know and we can sort it out.

I hope that helps.

 

[Phill Dyson]

Not really lol.....seperate sections would be preferable