What about a texture exchange server?

[D'Lanor]

Brainstorm idea: how about a simple entry requirement like adding a texture or model of your own, before you can download the rest for free?

That would defeat its purpose as a resource for writers who cannot texture themselves. And people would be uploading crap just to get the good stuff.

[Lontahv]

Well, we don't really have "members" in the strict sense here Diafero, if you're joined you are just as much part of the writers as I am. So, by joining the forum you become a writer.

How about this idea:
Texture download quota if you're not joined to the forum.

See, the admins of this place have to deal with quotas as well so why not pass it on to others who aren't joined? This would get rid of trawling by non-members. It could be something big like 15 megs of textures... this is a lot considering we only decrease the quote for full-versions of the textures and you can look at the thumbs all you like without depleting the bandwidth-quota.

[Grogyan]

Or how about a simple voting system, giving credit to in the vote to the artist that created the texture?

[Trylon]

I'm with Lontahv here, but I'd say it should be tied in to the registration on the TEX server, if the TEX server is connected to the forums here, fine, but if not, I don't see why quota/non-quota should be linked to forum registration, instead of TEX server registration.

Oh, tip: add a captcha to the registration form for the TEX server.

[Lontahv]

Oh lol, well I didn't really mean the forum registration as much as being registered to the TEX server (and I assumed it'd be connected... silly assumption ).

Well, the reason I'm going with the join-the-forum join-the-TEX-server thing is that PhpBB takes care of all sorts of problems like how do you contact someone when they do something bad on this server? And about making a completely new sign-up etc. This I'm imagining to be one of the "services" of being joined to the writers (forum) just like the wiki.

[Lontahv]

Looking at the old posts on this forum I have a question:

Do we have a dedicated server pinned down?
and
Could we look into buying a server and sticking it in a server-bank so it's more of a one-time cost so we could gather a pile of money at one point... people will get bored of paying monthly.

I imagine those 1000$+ dollar servers are kinda part of the cost of the renting... not so much the web-speed. Another thing about buying a server of our own is that we could make it perfectly suited to our needs (ie. add a 250GB HDD).

EDIT: O.O ok, I take that back about the internet connection not being the most expensive part of it.

EDIT2: http://www.serverpronto.com/starter.php <--- that looks like a pretty good deal there... haven't found any catches... yet.

[belford]

My experience is not immense, but I do help manage a big web archive with a "anybody can download this stuff for free" policy. (The IF Archive.) So let me talk about that.

We have bandwidth problems -- but they come from two sources: robots and hotlinkers. That is:

-- robot crawlers that try to download every file on the web (some for search engines, others for who knows what).
-- people who put your URL into a web forum signature, so that millions of forum readers are passively hitting your server.

Neither of these has a darn thing to do with membership policies. (The IF Archive has none.) We can accomodate any number of human users, as long as they're browsing by hand and downloading one file per mouse click. The problems only arise when automation multiplies one click to thousands.

In other words, you don't need to limit access to members. You can limit access to human beings who have consciously chosen to visit your site. By doing that, the user has already proven himself to be not a part of the problem.

The solutions to the bandwidth problem are:

-- Set up a robots.txt file to exclude robots from the big files. (Most web crawlers respect this. The few that don't, you IP-ban.)
-- You want to leave the index pages accessible to robots, so that your site is Googleable. This isn't painful because index pages are small HTML files, not giant images.
-- Make the images available as zipped files, not raw JPEGs or PNG files. You're not zipping them for size -- you're doing it so that they're not hotlinkable.
-- You're going to need small (thumbnail) images on the index pages. These can't be zipped, obviously. But you still want to prevent hotlinking. Use either cookies or the Referer header.

My guess is that if you do these things, you will not need any kind of registration system.

[Dachannien]

Very good points, Belford.

My worry is that a puny thumbnail won't be enough to show people what a texture is about, and a moderate-size thumbnail will be big enough that people may try to hotlink it. The thumbnails (either an actual reduced-size version of the image, or a rendered "what this looks like in actual use" image) will have to be shown up front as image files rather than zips/rars. So, as Belford said, you'll almost have to use a referer-based system a la various free webhosts (just think of all the Tripod and Geocities logos you saw in people's forum sigs back in the day), or you'll have to tie access to those files to the creation of an account for access.

On a side note, I'd love to see the catalog include sample images that contain rendered objects using the aforementioned textures. The site could have a standard boulder object, and the sample images in the catalog could show Blender renderings of the boulder with each rock texture applied. I don't know whether this could be automated, or if the site should just provide instructions to people for making and submitting such sample images voluntarily.

[Lontahv]

That were some good points ... but in your case Belford I think that there are more little files. In this case someone downloads 1gig of textures and the quota is depleted hugely.

Let not have bulk zipped textures, let's make the people browse before they can deplete. We can do the math if we have a 1gig texture "pack" that all of the active writers download (say 50)--that would come out to 50gigs of depleted quota for just one file. 50gigs is quite a bit when it comes to quotas from what I've seen.

So, I think that we have two clear possibilities:
1) Get a quotaless server and make the writers pay though the nose
2) Try to reduce bandwith consumption per user

One in my case is an impossibility in my case (I assume the same goes for many others here as well).

So, we are left with two. We need to find some way to not have people using this thing like crazy and downloading millions of bytes more than we can all afford.

[Trylon]

Doesn't a login system already inhbit hotlinking quite effectively?
And isn't adding a robots.txt file and a captcha system already quite effective against bots?