Irrlicht forum DO NEED a file/image upload service

[Keziolio]

For god's sake, 3/4 of the links and images on the forum are broken cuz they were uploaded on some unknown webhost/personal site that have closed/removed the files ages ago.
It's so annoyng, you seriously need some service to let people upload files on YOUR server and make them available forever, 3/4 of the forum post are useless. You find a lot of cool stuff, and then, damn, 404 ERROR

Or maybe, can't you switch to a forum software that supports attachments? For example, mybb ( http://www.mybb.com/ ) let you include files and images in a post. (this is better imo) It is also possible to migrate form another forum board to mybb, it's called "merge system" ad it supports phpbb.

http://www.mybb.com/downloads/merge-system

Please, i don't know who manage the forum and site stuff, but please do something, it's all too much fragmented, let people in the future download files we post today.

Thanks.

[CuteAlien]

One reason why so many images vanished recently is that we used the image hosting service of sourceforge in the past. Which got closed down and we only noticed it last week when a lot of the images were gone. We're currently discussing what to do about it. We might have some backups to recover some, but haven't decided yet on a new solution (probably we put the galleries into wordpress).

The phpBB forum is a hosted app on sourceforge which is why we are using it. The whole Irrlicht website is on sourceforge so it keeps on working even when team-members leave or when providers close down and similar stuff. Which is the reason it's been up (for most of the time) for a decade already - so not something we're going to change unless we have to. We had many other websites offering features for Irrlicht in the past (including file-uploads for example) - they all come and go over the years. And often take a lot with them when they suddenly go (like the mentioned file-upload service or our first wiki). This is the first time I know of where it has happened with stuff we hosted on Sourceforge :-(

I don't actually know of a free service that guarantees that images stay up forever. Imgur is for example nice for posting images for a while, but they also remove them later. And people can use that already anyway. Using other forum software would mean using a private server which from experience turns out to be a lot more risky. If you have other proposals they are welcome.

[hendu]

You're aware SF is closing hosted apps, no?

http://sourceforge.net/p/forge/communit ... etirement/

The Hosted Apps platform will be retired on 2014-06-19

[CuteAlien]

Uhm.. wow... no. I had no idea. I just browsed through old sf mails and found indeed one in 2012 mentioning that. Thought they wrote back then the would shutdown it in 2012 already.

edit: OK, short moment of panic gone. Forum doesn't seem to be a hostedapp (I have no idea what it is then - as it's hosted on SF, but not showing up in the hosted-apps dialog, but well, I'm not a sysop so I'll leave all the hosting-troubles stuff to others anyway).

[Keziolio]

Thanks for the answer.

Using a private server is not risky, why do you think so? If you had a domain you can host forum (and all the attached files), wiki, blog, bugtracker ecc. in one place, and backup 'em all in one shot. (ogre for example has its own site with all the stuff, but they have crappy phpbb too) Trusting in other's services is like deleting the files...

Now irrlicht it's all very messy and oldy, it's a shame, 80x80 max avatar size? serious? in 2014? And that crappy 2000s like graphics in the site! oh my god! And obviously broken links everywhere.
I know that the site is only for the support, but, jesus! For new users this make the difference.


I don't know how sourceforge works, i do not know if you can use the web space for your use (probably not) and i don't know who handle this stuff in irrlicht, i want only to say that this is really a shame for an opensource project. You need to make something asap. You seriously need to modernize all the stuff. Both site and engine. Things are going fast outside. Irrlicht is a very cool framework, it sad to see the site in this condition!

This is what things looks like at the sight of a novice, i do not know what you are doing, maybe you don't see the problems i see.

Thanks and have a nice day.

P.S. I can help with all the web related stuff if needed.

[CuteAlien]

Sure - we could someone let host it. And that guy leaves the team for some reason and disables the server and _everything_ is gone. As mentioned above we already _did_ lose stuff that way several times. Like the original wiki and one upload service which was used by a few people. People don't hang around forever, but work on a free engine fully motivated a few years and then suddenly leave - often not even saying good-bye but just vanishing into thin air. That's why an independent service which just cares about hosting is less risk. You will very likely hear months ahead if sourceforge ever starts to turn off it's servers.

Also this is not a cool enduser desktop app but a technical software engine. So the most important parts of the website is about offering help for developers. Which means stuff like a working forum, a bugtracker and good documentation. Experienced programmers will care about those things and not even notice the logo. Which is why that is the kind of stuff into which we invest time while the webpage is updated once per decade. If that means we lose a beginner programmer once in a while so be it. Sorry for bad links - we should remove those faster. But in general - I always considered Irrlicht website to work rather well for finding the information I needed, so I'm not too keen on changes (every change just means messing up workflow - and people will continue to complain after it just as they did before).

[kklouzal]

I completely agree due to the aforementioned reasons Irrlicht needs to stay running on a service *like* SourceForge. I've used PhpBB for many years and I know they have the ability to upload images to the web server it's hosted on although I doubt SF offers much file storage space for such purposes.
My proposed idea since were on the topic would be a three stage process and should take no longer than two months to get back up to full speed.

1. Start collecting donations, stick a paypal donate button on the main page, takes under an hour to setup.
2. Use these donations to purchase 1+ years of a domain and hosting from a service like http://godaddy.com/
3. Setup a Joomla site integrated with Kunena forums, both free and allow content to be uploaded directly to the host.

Payment for the host and domain can be automatically deducted from a PayPal account which happen to be where the donations come in at

Now we have a modernized website, forums, trusted hosting, and no worries of loosing any content.

[hendu]

3. Setup a Joomla site integrated with Kunena forums, both free and allow content to be uploaded directly to the host.
...
a modernized website, forums,

Honestly, that would be a step backwards. I just visited the kunena forums, they took several seconds to load due to JS overuse, looked ugly, and functioned badly.

Form over function is a bad approach.

Now irrlicht it's all very messy and oldy, it's a shame, 80x80 max avatar size?

Dear god no, I do not want to see your 1024x800 flashing animated image. Again form over function, taking up both space and attention from the content.

[Keziolio]

Thanks CuteAlien for the patience.

Also this is not a cool enduser desktop app but a technical software engine. So the most important parts of the website is about offering help for developers.

This is what i mean, i've opened this thread in a moment of desperation because some time ago i found some cool stuff posted by an user in the forum, that could be useful for my project, i saved the forum link for the future. Then, yesterday, i open the link, i go to the download link and i found a "file removed" error of some external file hosting...
This happened LOT of times, maybe for you pros or irrlicht developers this is a minor problem, but for me (not an irrlicht and 3d master) that shader, that class, that demo could be very useful, and finding dead links on 3/4 on user posted stuff is very frustrating.
Then the discussion shifted to some other topics, but this is the point, the forum isn't working well right now, imho.

I only wanted to say that, in the hope that someone does something. Thanks again.

[CuteAlien]

Sometimes you can contact the guys who put up the stuff in the first place and ask them to re-upload. Might help if you concretely need something.

I know that having a file-upload would be useful. Just not really sure how we can do it. We won't change the forum for now. So only chance would be to have some plugin which gives us file-uploads ... and then we would need some webspace where it could be put (like someone sponsoring Amazon S3 for at least a decade). And that would also need then some kind of control - as every general file-hoster on the net has to care about all the copyright laws stuff (DMCA takedowns etc) and no one of us is really keen on handling that I suppose.

[chronologicaldot]

It's a bummer, definitely. I used to host images on imageshack.us, but they switched to a $2-month pay service. It's cheap indeed for unlimited uploading, but if I ever stopped - *boom* - there go all the images.
Photobucket is the only free one left I can think of, though they switched to Yahoo-only accounts, lol.

Self-hosting is unreliable. So we're stuck with the same problems as before.

Also, I see nothing wrong with the appearance of this forum. I prefer it this way. It works. Don't "fix" it. The rest of the website looks fine too. It's not blingy, but it looks far better than many OSS projects I've seen.

[Darktib]

For the images, I think mediafire is still free and function wells. "casimages" is also good.

I saw on sourceforge that phpBB is considered as an hosted app... Maybe the Irrlicht forum is considered as "forum" and not "phpBB hosted app". Just for the sake of precaution, I think a full website + forum backup would be nice (just in case of ...).

I also agree with hendu and CuteAlien: the forum is rather good, focusing on the content while being ok graphically. It does not really needs to change.

[CuteAlien]

I checked with Yoran (our expert for this) and our forum is not affected by the hosted app removing. We only lose the old image hosting.

[REDDemon]

Everyone could just upload images to an altervista site. You get 10 Gb of storage and you can upload anything (to zip files to images) and having it referenced by an URL that does not change over time, you need no PHP knowledge, just upload to altervista webinterface. And is unlikely that an altervista site is got down (You have to pay only for additional features like Database that one time ago was totally free :/).

[christianclavet]

i saved the forum link for the future. Then, yesterday, i open the link, i go to the download link and i found a "file removed" error of some external file hosting...

That's one of the reason the dev created the IRR EXT repository. Some people made stuff that can be useful for the community and put it there, you could ask the author to put it there too.