deskthority - Suggestions and Changelog

[sixty]

Random idea: Maybe we can have a checkbox when making a new post in the media section? Something like "Grant rights to use these images in the Deskthority wiki".

[webwit]

It would be nice if we would have an at least optional SSL certificate on the website. Especially for when exchanging payment and address information via the PM system. Nowadays SSL shouldn't be the bottleneck for about anything and they come pretty easy on the monies.

I've researched this and it's too hard for our case because we have mixed content (external images). The browser will show security warnings. We'd have to host all external content or proxy it. We'd have to disallow external images or pull them in (which also brings up copyright issues).

[Icarium]

We could however just show thumbnails and make them link to the external images.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

External content is a pain. I had a tab open on a topic (geekhack in this case) and at least one image no longer loads — and it was an image I needed for wiki reference purposes. The image is external, and it's on imageshack I think, who tie images to servers, and then seemingly kill off servers, so the picture is completely irretrievable: the image URL doesn't contain the username, album ID or any other clue that could be used to bring up the image on another server or bring up the album page.

Another reference image down the drain.

The irony of course is that all the external images are the only ones that survived rootworm, but then you have people who have disappeared (sixty, Wellington etc) and their site's gone with them. sixty is back, but I couldn't cite the odds on him recreating the original site with every image back at its original URL. No idea what happened to Wellington, but a lot of images died along with his site.

[Icarium]

So you're saying we should just copy all external content and figure out how to deal with the copyright issues if there are any?

[Hypersphere]

Has anyone else noticed that the DT site has been slow during the past two days or so? It takes a long time to load a selected page, for example, when selecting "View your Posts" or "Spy" from the home page. I do not think it is my computer, browser, or connection speed, because other sites are working okay. Sorry if this is off topic; please let me know if questions like this should be referred elsewhere. Thanks.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

So you're saying we should just copy all external content and figure out how to deal with the copyright issues if there are any?

It's one of those things that is probably too late to fix now.

[xbb]

Has anyone else noticed that the DT site has been slow during the past two days or so?

Same speed as usual for me (fast)

[Icarium]

So you're saying we should just copy all external content and figure out how to deal with the copyright issues if there are any?

It's one of those things that is probably too late to fix now.

It's never too late to start.

Your preservation issues are however unrelated to the SSL problem.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Considering that external content within topics is one of the key problems with adopting HTTPS in the first place ........

[Icarium]

Yeah, but external links are not a problem and pictures from external sources are easy to detect and can be replaced by thumbnails. Maybe the can be copied, too. I'm just pretty sure that displaying thumbnails is fair use and there are no copyright issues.

[7bit]

I'd be fine with just links for external content. Because there is no rootworm for DT, it is much better to have text and photos in one place. Too often images are not accessible after some time when an image hoster went out of business, or redesigned their website, or the image got too much traffic.

[Icarium]

I'd be fine with just links for external content. Because there is no rootworm for DT, it is much better to have text and photos in one place. Too often images are not accessible after some time when an image hoster went out of business, or redesigned their website, or the image got too much traffic.

I think your two statements are contradictory. External links means the content is hosted somewhere else as opposed to copying everything and keeping it at DT. Did I misunderstand you?

[7bit]

I mean it is better to uplod photos to DT than to a photo site. It is always annoying to search for something and to find only dead links to some long gone site.

[Icarium]

Well, agreed and I guess a more comfortable interface to upload multiple photos and less restrictions on image size with automatic conversion could make that more attractive but I think we're mostly talking about images uploaded by person A and linked on DT by person B who doesn't have the rights to just upload them here again.

[Hypersphere]

I mean it is better to uplod photos to DT than to a photo site. It is always annoying to search for something and to find only dead links to some long gone site.

I agree. And unless the image is specifically and explicitly protected by copyright, I think (but I am not certain) that it should be sufficient to provide attribution to the image in the text or in a caption/legend to the image. Use of much of such content is covered by "fair use"; nevertheless, it is a courtesy to provide a reference to the source of the image.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

The wiki search and replace facility seems to be throttled like Vader :(

[webwit]

Ah that's my fault. I moved the simulated cron call from the code to a crontab. The first one checks for jobs with a page view, the second each 15 minutes. I lowered that to 5 minutes.

[Hypersphere]

General question: I found a service manual for the IBM Displaywriter system (including the beam spring keyboard)
online as a PDF file. Because links to such things might change or disappear, it seems that this would be something of interest to DT users that could be archived in the DT wiki. What is the procedure for suggesting such items for archiving? Thanks.

[Icarium]

Just add it, it's a wiki.

[002]

Add it to the External Links section here: http://deskthority.net/wiki/IBM_Displaywriter
Broken links are not something that can easily be avoided. The best we can do is flag them when we find them and move on. In most cases, the information can be found elsewhere anyway.

[Icarium]

I think a local copy would be nice. Anybody want to google for legal shizzle? :p

[webwit]

There's now a search function for private messages.

[rindorbrot]

That's a nice function!

[Muirium]

There's now a search function for private messages.

Hurray!

Now to find something else to bitch about…

[webwit]

Na, you both misunderstood me.

I meant permalinks in quotes.

Unbenannt.png

I'd like to have a permalink somewhere where I indicated in the example pic.

Often posts are not completely quoted and/or on previous pages.
When I like to read the whole post which another one quoted, I have to digg through the thread.

Something like this (permalink is marked):

Unbenannt1.png

That's what I meant.
Sorry I didn't phrase it so well :/

This is now implemented, see the link at "Acanthophis wrote:"

[Muirium]

This is now implemented, see the link at "Acanthophis wrote:"

Neat. It's almost like someone's actually running the asylum, sometimes…

[webwit]

Due to lack of volunteers, I rotate between chairman, secretary, treasurer, sysop and software. I probably forgot something.

[002]

Mu you really ought to put your hand up for one of these roles. You basically live here man.

[Muirium]

Well, I don't code and I'm shitty with money. What else do we need?

Due to lack of volunteers, I rotate between chairman, secretary, treasurer, sysop and software. I probably forgot something.

Yup. The occasional trolling, too.

Anyway, you do a pretty good at most of them. Thanks for the recent string of feature upgrades. We'll figure out how to misuse them soon enough…