Gallery, Projects and General > Gallery
Photobucket & Third Party Hosting.
AdeV:
A possible solution
I recently set up a Coppermine album for another forum on which I am admin. Coppermine is free software, and although it's a bit clunky compared to the slick offerings from Photobucket, Flickr, etc., it has the advantage that it's not controlled by some mega corporation.
These days, online hosting is available pretty cheaply. e.g. I have a Linode server, which costs $20/month, which hosts all of my e-mail, 2 forums, the coppermine gallery, and an instance of Nextcloud which I use to store files for myself. There's still a fair amount of disk space free, albeit probably not enough to sensibly host a gallery for a forum as popular as this one...
My proposal is this: If 3-5 of us could get together to fund the hosting, I'd be happy to set up a coppermine gallery for the exclusive use of MM members, on a fresh server. If we start with the $20/mo offering from Linode, that will probably last for 3-4 years before it needs upgrading (and longer, if Linode lets us buy additional storage without changing the server).
The reason for having a few people looking after it:
- It's not vulnerable to one person falling ill (or worse), or going offline,etc.
- Better response times if a photo requires moderation, or if there's a problem with an account, etc.
- If hosting funds run low, a collection of people are more likely to be able to top up any shortcoming without too much pain
I'd suggest setting up a paypal account to handle the hosting fees. A paypal a/c allows us to beg for donations from happy users to help defray the costs of hosting.
I presume Eric controls the madmodder.net domain, so it should be possible to add a DNS record to that to point to the gallery, thus binding the two sites together under one umbrella (e.g. photos.madmodder.net could be the address), which also reduces costs as we don't need a dedicated domain name.
If there's a general feeling that this is something people would be interested in, and I'd be particularly keen to get Eric's input, then getting it started is easy. I could put the thing together on Monday.
Any thoughts?
awemawson:
And how long would it be before Coppermine, having become successful, gets sold to Photobucket and it all starts again?
IMHO better to help Eric fund the existing forum running costs, and encourage people to use the forum to store pictures, so we don't get all the 'missing picture' threads. They always seem to be the one worth keeping, yet they're lost :med:
AdeV:
--- Quote from: awemawson on July 01, 2017, 06:54:53 AM ---And how long would it be before Coppermine, having become successful, gets sold to Photobucket and it all starts again?
--- End quote ---
Coppermine is open source software Andrew - the worst that can happen to it is its developers give up on it....
awemawson:
But wherever 'Coppermine' is hosted is subject to the same vagaries over time - better that the forum owner also controls the forum data. Then at least they share the same future fate !
I say we should all in some way help fund Eric
vtsteam:
Ade, I host a business account with webmasters.com (and have since 2002) and have had great service with zero complaints -- and that one is $9.95/mo. It's a high quality professional, hands-off outfit (unlike GoDaddy and the like) Just mentioning it to add to the mix here, of possible hosts.
Other observations:
I've been downloading my Photobucket albums in preparation for abandoning that ship. Interesting point....the downloads all originate from Google servers.
Thinking about what happened at PB, imagine YouTube going the same route.....
The next few years should be interesting with all the "cloud" dependencies people have made......
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