What about a texture exchange server?

[Chacal]

I just looked around a little, and so far so good. This will come helpful. Good work!

I just agreed to lorem ipsum. Scary.

[Carterhawk]

Looks great so far, but are tags going to be considered at all?

You have to think about the system best suited for narrowing down tens of thousands of images covering all kinds of content down to the perfect few that are needed for the task at hand. For example, say you want to add a brown wall to your age, so first you filter all the textures tagged brown, then the ones tagged wall, then the ones tagged stone (brown+wall+stone), or maybe tagged wood (brown+wall+wood), and so on and so forth. Once a tag system is actually in place, it might even be helpful to have the add-image tool suggest tags as you type them, as slashdot does, to help keep the number of very similar but differently spelled tags to a minimum.

Please, keep up the good work, this is a most impressive start, but I hope it isn't the only way textures will be browsable on the site, as I for one would certainly go very insane very quickly (not unlike trying to find the right category on dA).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata)

----Carterhawk

[Whilyam]

Not sure if you guys know it or not, but if you send someone a link to the site when you're logged in, it logs them in as you. If you just send them something like "http://www.texturu.de/texturu/elements.php" it will show up properly, but if you copy the whole url (with the id numbers and letters) it logs people in as you.

[tachzusamm]

Looks great so far, but are tags going to be considered at all?

Yes, surely. The current status is that the author can add keywords to the item he uploaded, as well as some "Editors" (some sort of Moderator) can edit keywords an item is tagged with, to expand the search hits. Currently I'm a bit unsure if everybody should be allowed to add tags to any item.
Searching is already buid-in, although your (brown+wall+stone) scheme is planned but has not been done yet. At the moment, just a search expansion is possible (it finds "brown animals" AND "grey bricks" if you search for (brown bricks), that is, separated with a space), but search refinement will not be such a biggie. Already planned.
Thanks for the link, useful information. I was smiling how much of those avenues of approach I already considered without knowing about that article, hehe.

Not sure if you guys know it or not, but if you send someone a link to the site when you're logged in, it logs them in as you. If you just send them something like "http://www.texturu.de/texturu/elements.php" it will show up properly, but if you copy the whole url (with the id numbers and letters) it logs people in as you.

Yes, I'm aware of this. And that's why we currently run only beta-phase. The reason for that behaviour is that I currently only check for the session ID (sid), so if you hand your sid, you "share" your access. Currently. To solve this, I could a) cross-check with IP address; this would help if the other user has really a different IP. Or b) I decide to rely on cookies, which would be the best solution, but this would mean the login system will only work if everybody enables cookies. Or I try to use cookies and fall-back to sid in URL when cookies fail, but this needs a bit more programming.

[diafero]

Yes, I'm aware of this. And that's why we currently run only beta-phase. The reason for that behaviour is that I currently only check for the session ID (sid), so if you hand your sid, you "share" your access. Currently. To solve this, I could a) cross-check with IP address; this would help if the other user has really a different IP. Or b) I decide to rely on cookies, which would be the best solution, but this would mean the login system will only work if everybody enables cookies. Or I try to use cookies and fall-back to sid in URL when cookies fail, but this needs a bit more programming.

Well, it's not that much work to have a fallback. I actually did that for a login system I wrote (without using the standard PHP functions to have more control), and IMHO it's not much more work (i.e. only about 5 lines of code more) than always using the URL which is already implemented.

[Carterhawk]

You can't really have a login system without cookies anyways. I'm constantly annoyed by ebay and amazon's constantly asking me to log-in when i'm sitting on my personal computer that no one else will ever use. I know some subscription type sites will use the .htaccess file to record and restrict access to a secure directory.

[Trylon]

Curious: Why are you providing the session ID in the get string?
I ususally just use the php $_SESSION_ variables without the need for providing a session ID at all.

[Godot]

Check out the Blender resources page for free textures and materials and more.

http://www.blender.org/download/resources/#c2511

[tachzusamm]

Okay guys, an UPDATE.

• It's no longer possible to "share" your access like Whilyam experienced (nor to "steal" the session id). When you have cookies enabled (a good idea when you are active in forums anyway), no session id will be put in the URL any longer. If you don't enable cookies, it will, but only your IP address will be accepted, so "fallback" is implemented. (Diafero: Indeed, it took about 5 lines of additional code - since I understood the relations, hehe. Trylon: Well, Internet Explorer. Seems I had a misconfiguration in IE so it did not work at all, only in FF, so I assumed first there must be a miracle with $_SESSION. My bad.)
  
• Clicking on the download-link will no longer produce cryptic question marks displayed in the window, but provide a "save file" dialog as intended.
  
• Image file support for TIFF and TGA implemented. Thanks for the suggestion, Paradox.
  
• The server is now available under www.texturu.org as intended ab initio. (texturu.de will still work too, it's just the same server.)
  
• The "About" and "Registration terms" texts now contain meaningful information. No need to agree to lorem ipsum any longer.
  
• In the WELCOME area, menus "license models", "privacy policy" and "faq" have been added, so everything regarding "terms of use" should be clarified now. If someone has suggestions about how to improve, or hints what I forgot, very welcome. Oh, and if you have suggestions how to express the texts better, welcome too. Not only typos - I'm not a native speaker.
  
• Finally, and that was the most work to do, support was added to give the submitter the option to choose between 2 license models (PD and URU/MystOnline-related), as well as making it clear for the members. I hope you like the current solution and everybody can feel okay with it. I did not want to decide neither for the "I want it all free" fraction, nor for the "This must be an URU related server only" fraction, so I guess I found a good way.

@Whilyam: In case you are wondering why your uploads are now marked yellow and as "(unspecified)" - that's because you uploaded your artwork before the license model was in effect. So, if you want to get this fixed, you could either remove your files and upload them again, this time choosing a license model, or you could just let me attach the desired model if you tell me which one you would like to apply.

[Trylon]

Good work