h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I meant unpaid.

I wouldn't mind blobbing the occasional picture.

You need a special sort of access to the databases to blob pictures. Even the Italics aren't allowed to do it from home.

Anyone who wants to be an unpaid Editor is out of luck. I tried that one for months before a job actually came up.

MINA!! :D

You're famous!

Have you read some of the backlog? What do you think we could do to help?

Send us

Wasn't thinking along those lines but fair enough.

What's your address? And what's your favourite kind of cake?

Amy - the reason the focus is on the italics and the system and not us researchers is this:

1. Italics are the only ones who can expand the CA scheme to allow community art

2. Researchers, as stated, are happy to create their own community graphics, shown by Werekitty's great Spaced Out Guide logo.

3. This leaves the simple (or not) process of blobbing t the italics, and if they can't find time to do that blobbing at the moment, then it is the italics thatmust re-arrange their time slightly to find the time. the communit has a limit to it's powers. We can't blob pictures. If, say, one or two community artists were given the power of blobbing and running this branch for community art, then i'd be happy.

4. Post 121 "Back off and see what happens." firstly i consider that statement very rude. secondly, asking questions is how you find out the facts and question the fairness of all ventures. and thirdly, i've backed off since the scheme started 7 months ago in december and there still ain't an opening for community art, so i'm not gonna back off, i'm gonna push forward with this until it happens! then i'm gonna get the spaced out guide logo blobbed, and then i'm gonna sit on the sofa with a cup of watching football!

5. in answer yo your questions which you answered youself but i'll answer anyway:

Q. Does anyone need to be convinced that Community Art is a good idea?

A. No, but there isn't any appearing yet.

Q. Will it help to remove the badges from Wowbagger and Greebo?

A. If neither are involved with the scheme itself and are not meeting the Front Page requirements, or have had the rigourous testing to get in the scheme, then yes it would help, as it would remove the unfairness of the world that has become a plague of h2g2, and prejudice, discrimination, favouritsme and unfairness ca be found everywhere, and must be crushed now!

Q. Will it help to devote Werekitty's time to Community Art?

A. If it is Werekitty's or any other researchers wish then yes, it will help, as someone who doesn't want to do Front Page graphics but would enjoy community art may then volunteer to join he scheme, and don't i keep hearing "we don't have enough CAs", "we don't have enough CAs", "we don't have enough CAs", well maybe if you opened people up to just doing community art then maybe you would have more CAs. Since you seem to be managing without Werekitty, Werekitty going straight to community art and just community art wouldn't effect the number of graphics appearing on the Front Page. BTW Wowbagger and Greebo should keep their badges if Werekitty has the option to just do community art.

Q. Will it help to find ways of lightening the load on the Italics?

A. No. the italics have a certain amount of blobbing they do, they get paid to do their job, artists don't, so perhaps they should think of the community of unpaid volunteers who spend hours a day on the website and put in effort to create graphics. perhaps they should think of them when they are cashing their checks for sending all day saying "we don't have enough time"

Q. Should we devote the rest of this thread to thinking of ways of avoiding using up Italic time unnecessarily?

A. Not the rest, the thread is infinite.

g2g, so i guess that's all i have to sa for now.

spook

ps. sorry i keep using you as an example Werekitty, it's just that you asked to focus on community art and you told 'no' so i am focussing on why you don't have that option

The Itallics work very hard!
Besides Mina wanted to be an itallic for ages without being paid but she couldn't. She had to wait for a job opening.

I wonder if some people would be willing to work on the code for a blobbing system that could be made available to a few community artists.

Just out of curiosity why aren't we allowed to have external pictures in h2g2? If we could check they're Ok. That would save the problem of space and blobbing time.

The BBC is ultra-paranoid about content that could lay them open to court action. If you have a link to an off-site picture, a nasty person could swap that picture for something copyright or pornographic *after* the BBC have OK'd it. Even if the person hosting the image is trustworthy, it doesn't necessarily make them technically competent to stop a third party "hacking" the webspace and changing the image without their knowledge. That's partly why the blobbing is such a tortuous process; it can only be done from inside the BBC premises, so no external parties can upload "dubious" images into publicly visible areas.

Personally, I think the paranoia is overkill, as off-site pictures would be covered by their legal disclaimer on every page to the effect that "The BBC is not responsible for the content of third-party sites..."

wow. That is paranoid!



Do you think we have any chance of convincing them of that?

No, that's just what they expect us to try...

Firstly, I would like to apologise for telling you to back off. You're quite right, it was rude of me. You must do what you think is best.

There is much in your post with which I disagree but I'll restrict my comments to just a couple of important points.

There isn't a shortage of Community Artists. More will always be welcome but there is enough capacity in the volunteer group and it will not make any difference if we have people specialising in Community Art.

The management of the creation and blobbing of a graphic is a much more involved process than you seem to appreciate. Blobs cannot be deleted from the database so the responsibility for getting every aspect of commissioning, checking against specifications and regulations, blobbing and cataloguing right is one than must be taken on by a paid employee - one who can be disciplined if they get it wrong. Blobbing could not be done by researchers from their own computers.

Amy

fair enough.

I have always been intriuged by the effect the new dna websites have had on h2g2 as a whole, particularly on the amount of attention it gets.

To be fair there is probably very little that the itallics could divulge on the subject, but I wonder whos idea it was to do it.

The consequence of these other sites, while creating different communities, has only stretched the valuable resources of h2g2. To be honest h2g2 is so wide spread in its members and their opinions I can see no real reason why other web sites would need to be set up...except for financial reasons.

The image I have is of some board room in the depths of the web development side of BBC (or perhaps higher up), saying "Now we've got this web site that seems to be doing well, how can we get the most out of it?", and they decided to create the hub - and its subsequent off-spring.

Perhaps there is a long term scheme, which will benefit the web site, but I can only see how h2g2 has lost out on the deal to be honest. Stretched resources, and Jim being pulled here, there and everywhere. Were many new people hired to accomodate these changes? I suspect if there were, there weren't many.

But who am I to question these things? For a starter I'm far too late to do anything about it.

I can't disguise it, I am concerned for the future well being of the site. I have been told in various places that things are happening which (though could not be mentioned as it was all top secret) could improve the site.

I could probably go on, but it would be against my duties as an ACE (I've probably already done that, but anyway).

Anyway, I think there are things going on behind the scenes taking up a lot of the itallics time, that we here can not possibly change. Thats not to say that this conversation is pointless, because it isn't. Anything we can do to help I'm sure would be helpful. I'm just saying there are probably other things to consider other than our distracting conversations

Verc

Vercingetorix, there's a long discussion about this over on the DNA hub. Some of the reasons for having seperate sites versus areas within hootoo are as follows:

1) Seperate sites can have their search engine results limited to their own site, thus preventing searches on, say, a pre-teen sex education site returning a list of perversions from hootoo...

2) Seperate sites have individual settings for pre-moderation. At the moment, hootoo is the only DNA site that isn't pre-moderated. Some of the other sites *must* remain pre-moderated, so if they were just areas of hootoo we'd have to regress to global pre-moderation.

3) It's an obvious distinction, but seperate sites actually get their own front page!

There were several more issues, some highly technical (i.e. I can't remember the details off the top of my head! ) but the consensus was that seperate sites was the only practical solution, both from a technical and administrative standpoint.

"Blobs cannot be deleted from the database"

You are wrong again, Amy. The database is just part of a computer system. The staff may have (deliberately) made it difficult for themselves to remove blobs or other data from the servers but it cannot be impossible. This is fairly basic computer knowledge. Besides which, an italic has recently claimed (by inference) that it is not only possible but intended to occur at some point: <./>T286148</.>

Oh, and I forgot to mention, each of the seperate DNA sites has its own Italics, paid from the site's funding. If they weren't there, neither would their Italics be, so they have no impact on the workload for hootoo's Italics.

"each of the seperate DNA sites has its own Italics"

The exception to that is probably Jim et al.

SEF, I suspect "getting the graphics off the servers" is a lot different from deleting a blob from the database...

From years of lurking, I've come to the conclusion that the blob database is a huge linked list of some sort, and there is no practical way of removing a blob from the database without rebuilding the list from the ground up and updating every link to the blobs that follow it in the list. The only alternative is for someone to manually find the image associated with the blob in the graphics server (and all its mirrors) and replace it with something innoffensive, such as a single-pixel transparent GIF. That's not so much an administrative task as a technical patch.