A plea to go easy on pruning the Seat Pictures Forum

Our Pictures Forum was started since I joined. I've seen most posts and I think it has been a fantastic catalogue of our cars and a great resource.

I was rather disappointed to go in tonight to see that it had been cleared out leaving only the threads that had been posted in since October 06. Gone - Laf's ovni cars from Croatia, that lovely 'orange' 20VT4 conversion some of the amazing internal retrims and countless others.

I appreciate that the threads are dependent on posters maintaining the hosted albums and holes appear. For example, Mr Roboto's picture thread is the second most viewed in that forum. Last time I looked, a lot of the links to pictures were broken.

I'd like to see some sort of balance being struck. We should encourage posters to keep the links up to date, some threads with a small number of posts maybe shouldn't be kept.

In some ways, it's a shame that pictures can't be uploaded to SCN. If they were, they could be saved indefinitely. Items on the internet are very transient. I googled to find some 20VT4 pictures tonight and there were virtually none - whereas 2 or 3 years ago there would have been stacks.

Has anyone got any feelings about a maintainable photo archive?

ZBOYD said:

Not aware of any pruning. I certainly don't. m0rk is away on holiday.

At the end of the day we can't host everything.

Storage means higher costs, and more bandwidth, which then means slower forum, slower site, which then means we need more money to buy faster server, more bandwidth it goes on.

Now we own our own server, were working towards buying a second owned server to spread the loads, but it won't be for another year at the earliest.

Small steps, lead to giant leaps eventually

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I take your point entirely Mark and don't disagree.

A good proportion of picture threads posted between early 05 and late 06 have gone.

I just wonder if, as the premier Seat resource, there is some way we could look to keeping an archive of the best pictures, rather than losing them for good.

mrcoyote said:

There's the members gallery on the main site isn't there?

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Reader's rides? Yes.

It doesn't seem to be as well supported as the pictures forum though, Ken. If it was, there wouldn't be such problem. It would probably mean too much work for whoever maintains that section though.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying SCN should definitely host pictures. What I mean is that we should try to maintain the links and encourage the posters to keep the liks up to date.

Saul said:

right click save as

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Not with beemer photos though.

That's the slot to the suggestion box sealed up then?