Okay, took too much time editting the previous post ... so here is a bit more in a seperate one:
There seems to be a campaign going on to get people to upload the images for their forum posts on WAB. There are a few points to consider if you really want that to happen:
* Make it easy!
* Make it
damn easy and fast!
* Make it even easier and faster!
Meaning: If people complain about not wanting to "prepare" (resize, recompress etc) their images so they will finally "fit" the requirements, then do it for them: accept any image and have a script resize/recompress it - that sort of thing. If you want people to contribute within pixel/kb limits don't ask
them to do spend their time on manually doing that, but let your machine do it for them and make the whole process so that it takes hardly any clicks/time (multiple image upload windows instead of one by one etc).
Then, after a long void, comes the next option: Make it so that people feel it's worth their while by contributing to a
very damn useful resource. The image galleries now are a
fair resourse but it's usefulness is degrading every day equally to the increase in size. You have the option here of gathering good images from many, many enthousiastic nature buffs, but the images would become much more useful in an (taxonomically) organized manner. Thumbnail pages of families or genera - that sort of thing - preferably with
checked/confirmed dets.
This would also give (even) more purpose to uploading here as opposed to Flickr or whatever - people would clearly see
"Hey look, that species is still missing - I have images of that!". Stuff like that. Should make people
want to contribute as much as possible ... oh yeah, and make it easy - or did I already mention that?
Well 'nough said for now. Again - please consider all this to be
constructive criticism!
Friendly greetings
Arp
P.S. BTW I've had to "correct" the URL in this message above several times as clicking on "Advanced" will do the substitution even before I can disable it
