Request for Lostmarble to host attachments

[ggoblin]

I am discovering that this forum has a wealth of knowledge spanning decades. Even posts from nearly 20 years ago are surprisingly relevant today as many techniques for character animation have not changed so much. I was researching how to animate a dress and found very useful posts on cloth animation from 15 years ago!

The problem I, and I'm sure many others, face is that parts of this invaluable Moho knowledge base has been lost because contributors images, diagrams, and moho animation files are not hosted by lostmarble and have had to be hosted on third party websites which have either disappeared long ago or the images have expired and been deleted.

Is it possible for lostmarble to host these important attachments? I feel this is an important request which future generations of Moho users will reap its rewards.

[cgrotke]

It would be great if the old broken links weren't an issue.

It can be quite costly to host and serve up image and movie files. It can add up quickly. An alternative would be to encourage use of (and make it easy to use) something like the Internet Archive, where it is free and "permanent".

[MrMiracle77]

There's a discord server, though participation is a little light at times.

[ggoblin]

It can be quite costly to host and serve up image and movie files. It can add up quickly. An alternative would be to encourage use of (and make it easy to use) something like the Internet Archive, where it is free and "permanent".

We can limit the size of files, say to 30mb, so short instructional videos can be included (screen capture videos compress well as the background isn't changing every frame - I recently saw a 3 minute instruction mp4 video at 720p resolution compressed down to just 15Mb ). If we look at the traffic, the forum only gets a few posts a day. If we say 10 people upload 30mb videos every day, then we still only need 110gb space a year. I dont think the cost is beyond what lostmarble could afford to pay to support its user base. Last I saw 1TB cloud storage (ie nearly 10 years worth of forum attachments) cost a few dollars a month..

[ggoblin]

There's a discord server, though participation is a little light at times.

I'm guessing thats a propriety environment like whatsapp or facebook? Its best to keep the system open source and firmly on the web to enable access for all, and fully indexable by all search engines so we can find those nuggets of knowledge when we need.

[chucky]

Is this forum powered by open source software?
Would a cloud storage also be?

Not sure if there's much of a difference

[SimplSam]

You will still have the big hurdle of user behaviour/preference... unless somehow you force users to upload to the site, which might annoy some - and dissuade them from uploading.

Also -- not everything old is gold. There was probably loads of historic junk that got wiped out too.

[ggoblin]

Is this forum powered by open source software?
Would a cloud storage also be?

Not sure if there's much of a difference

Actually it is powered by open source software - phpBB. The important bit is that it is hosted on the open web where all have access to it. If, for example, the forum was hosted on a propriety platform like a facebook group or a google group (both of which btw allow attachments), then access would be restricted to facebook members or people with google ids. Those corporations would set the rules, mine our data for profit, etc.. Also search engines could not index it as they would be barred access.

[ggoblin]

You will still have the big hurdle of user behaviour/preference... unless somehow you force users to upload to the site, which might annoy some - and dissuade them from uploading.

Also -- not everything old is gold. There was probably loads of historic junk that got wiped out too.

Users should not be forced to upload to the site. I believe there are open source plugins for phpBB to enable easy uploading from within the forum editor to cloud services etc. so users would automatically be encouraged to use the easy upload feature. Of course if they prefer to host their files in their own dropbox, etc then that is there decision which must be respected.

Yes I'm sure there is a lot of outdated stuff in the forum, but if the text of the outdated post is still available then there is no harm in the attachments of the outdated post to also be available.