Subject:
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Re: Musings on an open-source Brickshelf replacement
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.general
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Date:
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Tue, 7 Jun 2005 21:11:31 GMT
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Viewed:
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801 times
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In lugnet.general, David Eaton wrote:
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I definitely like the idea, although I would encourage it to be more generic
than “lego-specific”. Something that other online groups could use for sharing
images, etc., if they so wanted.
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I suppose, but in that direction lies scope creep, which can kill an open-source
project deader than just about anything else.
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A couple issues I can think of:
- If an owner of an image decides to remove something for some reason (or is
forced to due to copyright violation), there’s now no way of removing it.
Ditto moderated content. You couldn’t just remove the files from people’s
caches (if built on the principles as gnutella, etc).
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A good point. As for moderation, I was thinking that we could build in a sort
of rating system, with the tyical 1-5 stars, *plus* two more choices:
“off-topic” and “blatantly inappropriate”. These would be aggregated and users
could choose to ignore anything marked off-topic or inappropriate by a certain
percentage of viewers. That should discourage abuses of the system, though
couldn’t completely eliminate it.
I also assume that each image is tagged with the poster, along with description,
keywords, upload date, etc. So maybe we could have a way for the original
poster to “recall” an image, and this recall would propagate through the system,
much like cancelling a post in NNTP.
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- Dunno how much it would help. The majority of traffic (I’d think) would be web
- ensure that data wouldn’t
- people
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Well yes, that’s the whole idea. I’d propose writing the viewer in REALbasic,
which is easy and powerful, and can compile directly for MacOS, Windows, and
Linux with a native UI on each.
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2. ... So, the images would have to be stored elsewhere, hither and yon,
and this server would just act as a central indexer.
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Isn’t that effectively MOCPages?
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Maybe. I don’t know much about it either, and when I tried to check it out
today it wasn’t available. (And still isn’t now, I see.) I had the vague
impression that images are actually stored at MOCPages, and that perhaps it’s
also feeling the bandwidth strain. But I could be way off there.
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I don’t know much about MOCPages’ interface, since I haven’t actually used it,
but ultimately, I think something like that might be useful, only more robust.
At present MOCPages (when available) is kinda pokey, and I think there’s lots
of unused features that might be dragging it down. Like checking overall
ranking, other MOC’s by that user, user comments, etc. Stuff that *could* be
optional for the owner in order to streamline the page.
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Yes, perhaps so. But is it open-source? If the maintainer of MOCPages should
get trapped under something heavy, can the site carry on?
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I kinda wonder if you could combine the two. Here’s about the limit of my
techhy-ness:
Effectively, have an indexer site where you can upload/download with ease.
With each upload/download of an image, it offloads them onto the BrickTella
network (there would be ways of ensuring that when something is uploaded via
the site that it is *pushed* to certain client servers who have flagged
themselves as “bigger” storehouses or something).
Then, requests to the site simply get deferred to the network. When a request
comes into the central webserver, it looks up a place on the network where the
data is currently being hosted, and spits out a redirect. Each BrickTella
client has the option to run as a very limited webserver on a reserved port.
Hence, a request for:
http://www.brickpics.org/users/joeblow/vignettes/ihaveabadfeelingaboutthis.jpg
Turns into:
http://123.45.67.89:7360/users/joeblow/vignettes/ihaveabadfeelingaboutthis.jpg
And seconds later, turns into:
http://98.76.54.32:7360/users/joeblow/vignettes/ihaveabadfeelingaboutthis.jpg
All the indexing information is stored on the main site, but all the actual
heavy data is stored elsewhere.
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Hmm, that’s a pretty interesting integration. Of course, it’d be more work to
develop, requiring both a web server and the BrickTella app. But it’s certainly
worth considering.
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Of course, in reality, (all feasibility aside) I dunno if that’d work anyway.
It would require a lot of people to turn hosting on, and might cause issues if
you’ve only got a few (like 15 people) who’re doing it. Their connections
grind to a halt, encouraging them to turn off their web-hosting option.
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Yes, it does rather rely on people donating space and bandwidth. There are ways
to encourage this -- such as posting the weekly top-ten contributors -- but no
way to guarantee it. If there are too many people taking and not enough giving,
the system will fail.
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But assuming it started small and had enough willing souls lending space, does
that sound feasible?
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Yes. And I do like that not everybody has to run the client app -- and the
client app doesn’t need much UI. It just talks to the central server, and is
only run by people who want to contribute resources to the system. Everybody
else, and all image browsing/uploading, just goes through the web.
The cool thing about this approach is, if the system gets slow or starts having
periods of unavailability (due to load), you have a clear an effective solution:
grab the client and contribute some resources. The central server would always
point you to any locally-stored resources first, so you’d not only be
contributing to the common good, but also ensuring that you always have quick
response on your own machine.
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Musings on an open-source Brickshelf replacement
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| (...) Oh, mainly I was thinking in terms of expansion making the network stronger. If it's more generic, other communities will use it, and possibly add features, optimization, and potentially even bandwidth. (...) Hmm... Yeah, if users can (...) (19 years ago, 7-Jun-05, to lugnet.general)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Musings on an open-source Brickshelf replacement
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| (...) I definitely like the idea, although I would encourage it to be more generic than "lego-specific". Something that other online groups could use for sharing images, etc., if they so wanted. A couple issues I can think of: - If an owner of an (...) (19 years ago, 7-Jun-05, to lugnet.general)
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