Wiki Images

Could you explain to me the specific reason you only allow for local hosting? I gather its to prevent things from disappearing for good, like character profiles but makes no sense in the context of drafts (I know Krian Pearl is a really famous example of this)

And could you amend that rule so it only includes submission/final versions of a given article, not draft/beta forms? I go through TONS of revisions of images. We're talking eight to ten before I even consider getting something submitted and I know lots of other people who do exactly the same thing: Its a very common practice.

I think it would also be good to tell someone that the image shouldn't be there so they can make the change, instead of shifting the image off this mortal coil: If our game is retention, we should work positively rather than subtractively: Isn't losing content what we're trying to prevent?

I'd also like to ask if in future, the SARP Will have a better media manager? Dokuwiki's default is terrible. Is sluggish, the directory system is painful to work with, it has no retention and it doesn't scale well at all if you have a subdirectory with lots of images at it. Its easily the worst component of all of Dokuwiki and one of the worst media managers on any platform I've ever had to work with. There's lots of free open source options that are pretty great that would follow all of our directory and loading conventions without problems.

Sorry to be a pest and thanks.

Edit:
Is it possible to host an image on the forum to the wiki? The forum's image uploading is actually really nicely handled. We might already have a working solution.

Edit:
Found an open source image hosting tool we can use. Here's the source code so we can deploy it on the SARP servers if you like it, that'll let us not only upload images to our server but also metatag and search them like grown adults. It has a really slick interface, is VERY fast, has a VERY VERY LOW OVERHEAD and it has all the same read/write permission management of the old system without being TERRIBLE. It also has user-access-control.

• Here's the sourcecode for it: https://github.com/electerious/Lychee
• And here's the promo for it: http://lychee.electerious.com/
• And here is live demo for it: http://electerious.com/lychee_demo/

The wiki's media manager is a good example of how the SARP has growing pains that are entirely manageable with very little effort exactly the same as when we started using a wiki instead of a forum to store approved submissions or when we started moving toward pads instead of chats or when we moved toward a forum with social media features to allow us to post faster and then again, the shoutbox which allowed us to see who was doing what with huge convenience.

The one we've got included with dokuwiki is bare-bones and isn't really designed for massively parallel deployments.

We're growing. Growth is good. Let's keep growing.

So here I was, perusing some art for the Super Maximus when all of a sudden I noticed this gigantic watermark plastered rather distractingly across its hull

https://wiki.stararmy.com/lib/exe/fetch.php?cache=&media=nepleslia:supermaximus.jpg

Knowing that this is more than likely not a one time case I checked the wiki and it appears to be an automated function that adds the site watermark to all wiki images.

Some of them are even cut off, but mostly it is incredibly distracting and insulting to the original artist. These people worked hard to make sure an overall piece of art "worked" and without any sort of consultation to the members of the site, this heavy-handed automated watermarking process represents yet another site change shoved down our throats.

Why is it that we need these boorish ham-fisted watermarked monstrosities plastered over the face of site art when their origin should not be disputed on virtue of the fact they reside on the site wiki?

.... Why is this all over my art?

It's a plugin I was testing out. Due to feedback, the watermarking plugin has been disabled. The intent was:

• Advertising our site
  
• Discouraging image theft by other sites

Leave the advertising to us. We don't need no stinking watermarks.

It's been an ongoing struggle to keep third-party image hotlinks off the wiki and removing these has wasted a lot of my time. The reason these are there is because the wiki is Star Army's "official" lore and we don't want images disappearing on us or to steal other sites' bandwidth.

So starting tonight, using the name of sites like imgur on wiki articles will trigger the wiki's spam blocking feature and you won't be able to save the page until the offending text is removed. This should slow or halt the addition of new hotlinked pictures to the Star Army wiki and allow staff to concentrate on removing what's there already until there's none left.

Oh. That's not all positive from my point of view.

Rather than being confrontative, I'll pose the following question:
If I want to put images on the wiki and make sure to have the wished-for formating, how can I preview it without having uploaded an image to the StarWiki's storage already?

Because the way I was going to do it for my upcoming submissions, I would have created images, uploaded them to my album on imgur, applied it inside the desired StarWiki page, seen if the arrangement suited me on the wiki page, if not, create new pictures and upload them to the wiki again until I'd get it right. Once satisfied, I'd upload the appropriate pictures to the wiki and then replace my temporary image links with the new ones.

Seriously, that's how I intended to do it. The way I see it, imgur is suddenly no longer an alternative, and I'm going to find another image hosting site to do it (i.e.: photobucket... but it's super slow, ick)

Do you have a better alternative, or - perhaps - is there a way to relax the spam blocking feature on request so I can work on my image formatting during an agreed-upon window of time?

Isn't making images look right in the page mainly a matter of defining their size? e.g {{stararmy:image.png?300}}?

Really, I had no idea anyone was doing that. I'm okay with you uploading the images more than once to the wiki as long as you message me to delete any unused leftovers.

I can arrange a time with you, but it involves editing a configuration file on the server so it's not the easiest for me to do.

One of the reasons it was necessary is because there have been members, especially Osakanone, who have been deliberately ignoring the rules and continuing to add huge numbers of hotlinked imgur images on the wiki and this was the easiest and most effective way I could think of to stop them.

@Wes

OsakanOne said:

And could you amend that rule so it only includes submission/final versions of a given article, not draft/beta forms? I go through TONS of revisions of images. We're talking eight to ten before I even consider getting something submitted and I know lots of other people who do exactly the same thing: Its a very common practice.

Click to expand...

In the quote, from a post made by @OsakanOne in this thread. They already stated that the reason they use imgur images is to determine how they look on the wiki and decide whether they need alternative angles/images before they commit final versions to the wiki.

They've also in the same post expressed that they understand the reason why you don't want third party images to be used due to the issue of them vanishing.

@Fred isn't the first person to use third party image hosting to see what images will look like on the wiki before deciding on what images will look best.

This change is going to create more work for you since you'll have to frequently delete excess and unused WIP images from the wiki instead of letting people work out how images will look best on the wiki without flooding the media manager with small variations of images as they work out what looks best.

It's one thing to ban imgur images from approved articles, and another to prevent them from being used on WIP articles.

Make it criteria that NTSE mods have to make sure the images are locally hosted. Don't create work for yourself, and make it harder for the community to make wiki pages that look their best.

I'm happy to check image conformity. I haven't done so in the past despite it being on the checklist because I thought it was physically impossible already.

I'm still looking into an internal image hosting solution, too.

But the basic idea is that the wiki should be pretty self-contained, where when I backup the wiki, it backs up all the images on it too.

Stop messing with my imgur temp-wiki images. I'll make them wiki when they're ready for submission.