[ichigo]

Okay, everyone paying attention here? Good then!

I'm thinking about making a rather HUGE change to the gallery and want input from everyone involved, not just the staff, all of the people that visit the site should have a say in this. We currently run on vBgallery (from the photopost people.) And after a long term vacation by their development team, they're looking at starting work up on it! Good news I guess... Now for the other things, we're looking at changing the gallery over completely to a danbooru style (all php and mysql for the geeks of the community that wanna know the details.)

So, with that out of the way, here are options.

1: Stick with our current gallery software, and once a new revision is done, get it (possibly new functionality/features, and still the devs haven't given any concrete information about the update/new versions...)

2: Completely change over to danbooru. For the geeks here again, that means exporting the entire database, and reimporting it into postgresql (danbooru runs in ruby+postgresql environment only right now.) The transition time would probably be a fair amount and the results would be questionable. Of all the larger galleries on the web, danbooru is pretty much one of the standards and most widely adopted.

3: Completely change over to gelbooru. Gelbooru is a danbooru clone thats done completely in php+mysql and has a rather large following. Considering Gelbooru's post count is nearly half a million, and has a fairly large following too, it can't be discounted.

Here's where the problems lie with all of this. All 3 options present a large amount of work behind the scenes, database work, file storage/structure, and templates/general interface stuff.

Danbooru and Gelbooru have almost identical functionality, which is a great thing, as they are actually quite easy to navigate around with, searching is easy, and all around more optimized for a gallery the size of dat's.

Additionally, managing both of these are options are quite easy due to their nature. All edits/uploads are tracked and visible, if a user edits an image, it's tag/description history is updated with all the changes to it. So accountability is not an issue. Users are able to view everything. Trusted users are able to edit/re-tag images to their heart's content. And higher ups are able to revert tags/etc, and manage things a bit more. And of course, administrators have full control over the whole thing.

Now for some of the downsides to all of this... Moving over to danbooru or gelbooru would be a difficult process in terms of adjustment, database work, and all around redesigning things. And the biggest issue, is that ALL images will be dumped into one large pool. Because of the heavy reliance on tagging/keywords, it would be an enormous amount of work to maintain, as all of the mods/higher ups would have to maintain ALL images uploaded. This can be avoided by people actually tagging images when they're uploaded, so it's less hassle to manage/moderate. But as we've found, there are usually a shortage of keywords attached to an image even in our current gallery. Which is half of the issue right now with the inability to find specific things in our current setup.

That said, there'll be a higher, lets call it "standard" for people that regularly upload, in the fact that just uploading and putting random (hey, I'm semi guilt of this too with the mass upload category...) but people abusing it (like some currently) won't be able to get away with it anymore really. There will be alot more work for everyone, including the added responsibility of actually having to use sensible keywords, artists, etc when uploading, and the added help by publicly edit-able tags (and the accountability that goes with it) can bring.

Another issue with changing to danbooru/gelbooru is integrating them into our existing forum/user database would be a very difficult and time consuming task, and unlikely to be completed anytime in the even remote future...

So that's a brief rundown of things as they stand. I'll add a poll, and if you vote, it would be a great help to explain why you voted that way. Thanks !~

~ichigo