On 6/21/06, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske(a)web.de> wrote:
Using FlickrLickr to filter donated images sounds like
a great idea. I
could upload them to the FlickrLickr database if there's an interface.
I could hack an authenticated HTTP POST form that would allow you to
add metadata to the DB. Would that be good enough?
After the safe-upload experience, I wouldn't want
to store the image on
the toolserver ;-)
Sorry, I didn't follow this - what is the problem with storing images
on the toolserver? I'm not sure my server could handle all the
incoming image donations, and I've been thinking about migrating
FlickrLickr to the toolserver anyway.
Two problems with this:
* Each image in a zip file would basically get the same description.
Otherwise, you'll have to include a text file with the descriptions,
which is probably more hassle than uploading them one by one.
See
http://scireview.de/wiki/donations2.jpg - for each file in the ZIP,
the user would have to enter metadata after the upload.
* Zip files can be manipulated to grow into extreme
amounts of nonsense
data. Even a small zip fil could potentially result in hundreds of GB of
uncompressed data. A potential attack vector.
Listing archive contents should be a trivial operation. With PHP, you
could use the Zip module, which has a zip_entry_filesize function (not
sure if the toolserver has that installed). Or you could parse the
output of the "unzip -l" command. If a file is much larger
uncompressed than compressed, that's probably an indication of
something foul.
I have altered the text to show that option more
prominently. I'd prefer
to give the uploader some choice, though. Choice makes people think,
whil a single checkbox just gets, well, checked ;-)
I don't think most users of the form would have enough of a basis of
knowledge about copyright and licensing to make an informed decision.
If you want to make people think, prominently linking to a licensing
tutorial might work better.
Please remove the GFDL from the list of licenses. We really should
_never_ have images which are only under the GFDL. The GFDL is
completely unsuitable for such materials due to the requirement to
reprint the full license with every use. There is no dispute about
this as far as I know -- GFDL/CC-BY-SA dual licensing is the preferred
option.
Here's a thought: Let people mail their images,
descriptions, and
license to a central e-mail directly. Volunteers could then upload them
after checking.
Free form e-mail is difficult to process because every mail looks
different. It also makes it more difficult to collaborate using
interfaces like FlickrLickr.
Erik