Why does this site not allow attachments?

I honestly think this hinders the site and its mission. Open sharing becomes difficult.

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Bill

You can add links so having a Wordpress site or Wiki would allow anyone to make contributions.

There is a wiki: see here and PM Bruce or Garth for an account.

If you get yourself a free dropbox account you can post a link to a file in your public folder - and there are surely other ways of putting up content on the web for free. (A website on google sites, a code project on github)

At a guess, I'd say bandwidth and hosting costs.

I used Web based Picassa to store pictures I wanted to post, and just embedded a link in the post using the Img button.

Yeah, I'm aware of all those options, but it's just not the same, is it?

Off-site links get broken. There is ample evidence of this everywhere on the internet. Kind of ruins the intent when that happens.

The wiki approach takes all the spontaneity out of the exchange of information.

None of these are adequate substitutes for being able to quickly up-load a file to a thread.

Cost? Maybe. Where is this site hosted now? Some places are offering 500GB for less than $1 per day. If you enforce some reasonable limits on file sizes, which this software is very capable of doing, that is an awful lot of content.

Only my opinion.

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Bill

I believe Rich Cini is hosting it, free of charge, which of course we appreciate. $365 a year doesn't sound too bad if everyone chipped in a little; but we don't want to require a donation as a condition to be on the forum. For pictures, you could probaly use something like Photobucket or Picasa. I am not familiar with how those work. Our older son lets me use one of his websites. I know what you mean about people taking things down though. I would prefer that if they put it up and then link to it, they would commit to leaving it there indefinitely because I myself go back to things years later.

Hi all,


The website is well over two gigabytes, with most of that being the documents archive. That said, we aren't near any storage or bandwidth limits. File attachments in the forum would probably be fine.


This version of the forum software does not support attachments. We would have to upgrade the forum software or install one of the various plugins to do it. I haven't looked into it much because this is the first time that file attachments have been requested.


Ross Archer generously donated the hosting before we moved to our current location in mid-2006. I've taken care of it since then. We could add a small donation button somewhere but the site and forum will always remain free.

Regards,
Mike

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- Mike Naberezny (mike@naberezny.com) http://6502.org

The software used by the Commodore 128 site has a nice photo embedding feature, as well as other functions that are quite convenient. Not sure what's involved effort- or money-wise to make the switch.

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

So, does this mean file up-loads in our near future?

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Bill

I would welcome the ability to upload images to the forum. I also can relate to what Garth is saying, but in the real world your commitment to a third-party server won't be indefinite. Things change, and down the road you may set up a different account... Stuff can end up getting lost or overlooked that way. Really it's more sensible to store the image with its associated text -- on the forum!

While we're expressing wishes and preferences, is there any way that the forum software can limit the width of text formatting when an extra-wide image appears? I think we're all familiar with the problem. All the text gets formatted to that same width, and you can't read the text except by constantly scrolling horizontally. Do we have the technology to eliminate this minor aggravation?

-- Jeff

Most images that cause that problem don't need to be nearly so big, so they could be scaled down to fit the normal width without losing any important information. That's a pretty simple thing to do in html even if the user's image file itself remains at the large size. For my own, after taking a picture with the digital camera, I go into Gimp to crop, scale, etc. before posting. Gimp is free under Linux and is ahead of Photoshop in some ways.

It's a pity that neither the forum, nor some of the hosting sites, offer a simple way to scale the image.

Other hosting sites do offer a thumbnail.

Agreed -- it's true. It's also true that GIMP and many other programs can reduce the size. On the other hand, some forum users aren't up to speed re: image editing software. And, some images DO need to be wide -- like logic analyzer screen-shots. So no big deal, I was just musing out loud, that's all... If software can preclude the need to scroll while reading text, is there a downside to going that route? I guess I'm presuming that there's a suitable version available

-- Jeff