CTF Challenges Restored - MUST READ

Well, it is finally done. I restored the challenge galleries back to their origional form as best I could. I would like to give a great big thanks to Klaorman. Your fast and clear thinking saved the day by e-mailing Slug at PBase. His restoration gallery saved the day because the vandal(s) did not leave much. We all owe you a really big thanks!

Now some bad news. The vandal(s) trashed some of the titles and comments. I had little choice up to delete the damaged titles. If you see that you image title has been changed, please e-mail me and I will restore it.

Now for the second bit of bad news. After much consideration I dediced that Don Ellis is correct. The best way to safeguard the challenges is to keep the new password in very few hands. I came to this conclusion because for all we know the vandal could actually be one of us. I know it is a very ugly thought but it is a real one none the less. Therefore, I am going to ask the following people if they would volunteer their high speed capablities;

Don Ellis, Emese Gaal and Jim B (MSP)

If the three of you agree, send me an e-mail and I will forward the new password. From that point on, the four of us will be the only ones who can upload, delete and modify the challenge galleries. We will all have to come to some decision as to how to handle the next challenge.

In the mean time, you may still continue getting your pictures ready. I would suggest that anyone wanting to submit an image resize their images to no bigger than 1100 x 800 pixels. Please watch this post over the next 24 hours for the new posting instructions.
--Clifton
http://www.pbase.com/klyphton

Great job -- Thanks for all your hard work.
--Keep on shooting!Lisa

Ok peoples. If you want an image posted, feel free to send it to me (please resize it so my mailbox doesn't overflow with 2 MB images). Also include the title you want, your name, date, camera used, description, and any other information you want included.

I work 9 hours a day like everybody else so I probably won't be uploading your pics the minute you send them to me but they will make it up. I have a good cable modem connection so I don't mind. So let me know if I can help -

Emese--Pics: http://www.sciencemeetsart.com/emese/gallery/ Canon G2, S10, and some old-fashioned scanned film photos. Not all pics will have intrinsic artistic value as they are just a personal record of memories but some I hope you will find interesting.

Alrighty, sounds fair. I need to move my "Portrait of a Viewfinder-User" to the Exhibition gallery as it was more of a joke than anything. I've also made some changes to one of my entries in the Eligible gallery and would like to replace it with the new one.

Please let me know how to go about doing this.

Thanks,

Michael

Lisa Neal said:

Great job -- Thanks for all your hard work.

--
Keep on shooting!
Lisa

Click to expand...

As the title says - moved your photo to Exhibition. Email me anything else you need.

Emese--Pics: http://www.sciencemeetsart.com/emese/gallery/ Canon G2, S10, and some old-fashioned scanned film photos. Not all pics will have intrinsic artistic value as they are just a personal record of memories but some I hope you will find interesting.

Thanks. The changes may be somewhat minor, but I think they really help the overall appearance of the entry. Too bad there isn't a "replace image" option, but hopefully you can just copy and paste the details from the old version.

Michael

Emese Gaal said:

As the title says - moved your photo to Exhibition. Email me
anything else you need.

Emese
--
Pics: http://www.sciencemeetsart.com/emese/gallery/
Canon G2, S10, and some old-fashioned scanned film photos. Not all
pics will have intrinsic artistic value as they are just a personal
record of memories but some I hope you will find interesting.

Click to expand...

Emese Gaal said:

Ok peoples. If you want an image posted, feel
free to send it to me (please resize it so my
mailbox doesn't overflow with 2 MB images). Also
include the title you want, your name, date,
camera used, description, and any other
information you want included.

Emese

Click to expand...

Like Emese, I'm happy to help.

The good news is that I have a high-speed line that's on 24 hours a day. The marginal news is that I'm 12-15 hours ahead of you American photographers, so when you're emailing me and waiting for an instant post, I'm likely dreaming. Then again, if you email at night, I'm just waking up, so there are advantages. It occurs to me you might want to pick your addressees based on time zones -- I'm GMT +8.

You can reach me at either

[email protected]
or
[email protected]

As Emese said, please send all your information -- especially the category -- and I'll upload it as soon as I can. I WILL CONFIRM uploads by return email. If you don't hear from me within 24 hours, you will want to email one of the other three people. That shouldn't happen, however.

Here's quick run-down of information.

CATEGORY
Artist Name
Picture Title
Picture Comments (optional}
Camera
Location (optional)
Date (for Eligible Category)

If I've forgotten something, please let me know.

Cheers,

Don

No problem, Clifton! I was just shocked that the galleries were disappearing and, as I'm a programmer and systems support guy, I thought if PBase is well-run, it must have backups. I'm glad I could help. Let's get on with the challenges!

Klaorman

Klyphton said:

Well, it is finally done. I restored the challenge galleries back
to their origional form as best I could. I would like to give a
great big thanks to Klaorman. Your fast and clear thinking saved
the day by e-mailing Slug at PBase. His restoration gallery saved
the day because the vandal(s) did not leave much. We all owe you a
really big thanks!

Click to expand...

Thanks for the update on all of this! I had feared that something like this had happened when I saw it was all disappeared, but glad we have a system up to safeguard against it now

Klaorman said:

Klaorman

Klyphton said:

Well, it is finally done. I restored the challenge galleries back
to their origional form as best I could. I would like to give a
great big thanks to Klaorman. Your fast and clear thinking saved
the day by e-mailing Slug at PBase. His restoration gallery saved
the day because the vandal(s) did not leave much. We all owe you a
really big thanks!

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

-- http://www.pbase.com/angelwithasword/

Dear Photographers,

Because we all get tons of junk mail, it would be helpful if you could put something like: "CTF Challenge - Joe Bloggs" in the subject line when you're emailing photos to one of the four upload people so they don't go astray.

You're welcome to substitute your own name for Joe's.

Thanks.

Don

I 've agreed to help also.
I'd second Emese's & Don's suggestions here ( and in a later post).

Just let me know what info you want with a picture, and I'll get it up as soon as I can - generally within a day. Keep the file size reasonable. Most of the pictures can be compressed to
You can reach me at
[email protected]
As I get a lot of junk mail there also, be specific in the subject line.
I am in Minneapolis, on CDT.

While I have been coming to this forum for only a short while - it has been fun and educational. I won't let some clown stop that.
Lets keep the photos coming.

Don Ellis said:

Emese Gaal said:

Ok peoples. If you want an image posted, feel
free to send it to me (please resize it so my
mailbox doesn't overflow with 2 MB images). Also
include the title you want, your name, date,
camera used, description, and any other
information you want included.

Emese

Click to expand...

Like Emese, I'm happy to help.

The good news is that I have a high-speed line that's on 24 hours a
day. The marginal news is that I'm 12-15 hours ahead of you
American photographers, so when you're emailing me and waiting for
an instant post, I'm likely dreaming. Then again, if you email at
night, I'm just waking up, so there are advantages. It occurs to me
you might want to pick your addressees based on time zones -- I'm
GMT +8.

You can reach me at either

[email protected]
or
[email protected]

As Emese said, please send all your information -- especially the
category -- and I'll upload it as soon as I can. I WILL CONFIRM
uploads by return email. If you don't hear from me within 24 hours,
you will want to email one of the other three people. That
shouldn't happen, however.

Here's quick run-down of information.

CATEGORY
Artist Name
Picture Title
Picture Comments (optional}
Camera
Location (optional)
Date (for Eligible Category)

If I've forgotten something, please let me know.

Cheers,

Don

Click to expand...

--Jim

Can one of the password keepers kindly do me a favour and delete an image that's showing up on Page 4 entitled 'Abductee returns'?? It was a failed upload attempt (the Pbase server somehow 'creatively' scrambled my entry) but I think it may have been backed up, and thus restored.
Cheers!

Sebastian

Klyphton said:

In the mean time, you may still continue getting your pictures
ready. I would suggest that anyone wanting to submit an image
resize their images to no bigger than 1100 x 800 pixels. Please
watch this post over the next 24 hours for the new posting
instructions.

Click to expand...

May I make a suggestion for all you bandwidthly challenged people :

I think maybe all entries should be resized to 640x480 (or just so the longest side is 640, if it has been cropped) and then optimised down to 150k JPEGs. I've done this with all of my entries and gallery stuff for the last month or so and really can't see any problems, jaggies or nastiness.

This would save the bandwith of all the fine people who've volunteered,
save pbase bandwidth, and the time of the people submitting.

That's unless people think my entries are too small or suffer from the compression ?

I wouldn't make this a hard and fast rule, but at least a suggestion/ target people should aim for. A whole lot of people can't see pictures that are bigger than 640x480, due to using screens that are set up at 800x600 resolution. Maybe some of start forgetting that due to the luxury of large screens. (I'm typing this on a 21" wideformat screen at somewhere around 2048 pixels on the short edge)

Just a suggestion,

Gordon

Sebastian S. said:

Can one of the password keepers kindly do me a favour and delete an
image that's showing up on Page 4 entitled 'Abductee returns'?? It
was a failed upload attempt (the Pbase server somehow 'creatively'
scrambled my entry) but I think it may have been backed up, and
thus restored.

Click to expand...

Deleted.

Emese

--Pics: http://www.sciencemeetsart.com/emese/gallery/ Canon G2, S10, and some old-fashioned scanned film photos. Not all pics will have intrinsic artistic value as they are just a personal record of memories but some I hope you will find interesting.

Another suggestion. You can also upload zip files to pbase. This will decrease the size of the files emailed to the password holders.

Lee-- http://www.flyfamily.org

Why don't you designate ONE gallery keeper? one trusty person that will have time to receive submitted pictures in his mail and post them on the pbase gallery? messing a gallery is silly, but leaving it quite "open" to everyone means giving people too much credit... this was bound to happen...

Other solution would be not to make beautiful pictures: this wouldn't cause too much jealousy, and messing a messy mess would be useless

Lee Fly said:

Another suggestion. You can also upload zip files to pbase. This
will decrease the size of the files emailed to the password holders.

Lee
--
http://www.flyfamily.org

Click to expand...

Lee,

I always use zipped files to upload to pbase. I pick the dozen or so I want to upload, zip then into a file and that's what goes to pbase. Slug's system does a perfect job (from what I've seen) or extracting everything intact.

However, this does not appear to make the files smaller. I think that jpegs are already pretty compressed. When I look at my upload_to_pbase.zip file it is always very close in size to the sum of the jpegs included. This is born out when I look at the zip compression ratio which usually shows almost no compression.

From the standpoint of not having to sit in front of the screen and go back and forth uploading files, it is MUCH easier to send a 10MB zip file and get a cup of coffee (or read my 5 year old twins a story...to each his/her own!)

Larry

http://www.pbase.com/larryrz

Just bumpin' this puppy to the top.................

Great work Don Ellis, Emese Gaal and Jim B, and Klyphton!

jezcat-- http://www.pbase.com/jezcat

First of all I want to thank Emese, Don and Jim for taking care of these uploads. With a 56k modem and no internet access at work, it would be extremely difficult for me to handle anthing but the smallest uploads.

The problem we are all facing now is what to do in the future. Emese, Don and Jim cannot devote their lives to uploading images. Spreading out a password to everyone (even via e-mail) is still too risky. So what to do?

The only suggestion I have thus far is that the winner of the next challenge should reset the password yet again and seek new volunteers for uploading (about 4 or 5). This way there will only be a handful of people with the password at any given challenge.

Let me hear from you guys and gals out there. Perhaps there is a better way.--Cliftonwww.pbase.com/klyphton

Slug says he's working on an upload-only access mode, but he's not done with it yet.

Klaorman