Chile Forum

We now have a photo Gallery. This is still very much in the testing phase to make sure it does not cause any problems.

http://www.allchile.net/chilephotos/

It is integrated in to the forum logon system. One username and logon will work for all members.

PLEASE RESIZE YOUR PHOTOS BEFORE TRYING TO POST. IT WILL KEEP OUR BANDWIDTH AND DISK SPACE BILL UNDER CONTROL.

PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF YOU FIND ANY SPAM. I WILL BE WATCHING.

ONLY PHOTOS RELATED TO CHILE.

ONLY PHOTOS FOR A GENERAL AUDIENCE

WARNING: ABUSE IS GROUNDS FOR BANNING. When in doubt, please ask me.

Thanks, looking in to it.

First I will issue a one time exemption for El Puelche's dog. He must however show ID that he is at least 18 years old in dog years. Everyone else though needs to put some clothes on their dogs, horses, cats, and so on. We can not have naked animals running around the forum. This is not farm (well sort of).

Regarding the photo bucket and other similar sites. Here is the problem, every time you link out to photobucket, you are pumping up those sites via the "link juice" from the forum here. To be very honest, I think they have plenty of their own. On the other hand, as people post more and more photos here, there is more and more content on http://www.allchile.net that is only about Chile. Thus, the position of both the forum and information about Chile increases in the search engines.

The idea is to try and centralize and not dilute Chile information in to sites that are much broader such as yahoo groups, aloxpat and so on. The same holds true for photos. It makes it harder for people to really find information about Chile, because the page they post it on in those big community sites are less important in the eyes of Google, MSN, and even Yahoo itself because they are just one in a billion pages on other topics.

The idea is to build topic power for the forum, and better grab people who are looking for information about Chile, before they get swallowed alive by one of the bigger websites and their valuable questions and information along with it.

I also I thought it would simply be fun to exchange photos. Chile is a big place, and we often talk about destinations and things that other have no idea what they are like. For example, I am still just starting to get my brain around the North of Chile. Hell, I am still trying to get my brain around much of the south of Chile.

Now, all that said, I have to finish getting everything tweaked on the photo gallery.

Regarding coppermine gallery, I picked it because of its easy integration in to the forum. I use lots of different sorts of galleries for different sorts of things. It is fairly mature and robust code. However, as I am still in the testing phase, I might swap it out for something else if I find something that is a show stopper about it.

Think I got the problems fixed. Please give it go so I know everyone is able to use it.

Sorry, I seem to have gotten the link at the top of the page wrong and did not notice.

You should be able to upload photos. If you are having a specific problem, please let me know. I am still working out the kinks.

As for security issues, I am keeping an eye on it. Anytime you allow public user data in to a site through forms or other upload methods, you are opening a whole can of security worms.

I know a lot of server host with shared servers will kick systems like copermine off if they are not kept up to date constantly. If it becomes too much of an issue, I will switch to something else. For now I am keeping a tight leash on it. As it proves its self, I will open up more space and such for the users.

say, regarding linking out to photos on other sites I just had a thought on another reason that it would be preferred to use the photo gallery here.

If you link to a photo on another site in a post, and say in 6 months they move or remove the photo, then the link will be dead. If you post it to the gallery, then link to it in your posts, it will stay on the same server.

You can still link to photos on other sites, I am just trying to encourage everyone here to try and keep it local.

I am going to start a collection of Chilean beer photos I think of all the Micro brews and other beers I find in southern Chile. You know, important information.

By the way, I am keeping the number of photos and MB rather limited currently for a bunch of reasons but mostly because if something goes wrong, and I have to get down and dirty with say changing to another gallery system, I do not have to try and salvage gigs of data.

Also, I currently have to keep the bandwidth bill and such under control to about a 1 gig of disk space for the photo gallery.

Like I said, as everything gets rolling I will take the leash off and add more disk space and band with. I just don't want to wakeup one morning and find a notice in my in box that we blew through our monthly bandwidth limit for the forum overnight because some spammer found the photo gallery.