Hi folks!

I have just upgraded DCSki's Message Forum software. For the most part, the Forums should act in a familiar way, but you will notice some new features and enhancements.

Because some of the new features could be abused, we are now going to require registration before anyone can post. If you have already registered, you should be good to go. All users should be able to view messages. But if you would like to post replies or new topics, you will need to register and provide a valid e-mail address. The Forum will send a password to your e-mail address.

If you need to register, click the following link:

Register for DCSki Message Forum

There is an option to hide your e-mail address from other visitors, and I would recommend that you *enable* this option unless you want your e-mail address to be viewable by all. (As a warning, "spambots" sometimes harvest e-mail addresses from public message forums.)

If you encounter any problems with the new DCSki Message Forum, please let me know.

Thanks!

- Scott

Test

www.dcski.com

This ROCKS!!! What a great improvement.....THANKS SCOTT...

Scott:

Where is a good place for members to upload photos, so that they can link them to the forum. I use Yahoo Photos but it does not allow for such a link? Instead, I experimented with the photo feature by linking to a photo on dcski.

I think the photo feature will really energize the forum.

Hi John,

There currently isn't a way for users to upload photos to DCSki -- the new forum software allows users to embed photos within a message (as you've discovered ), but the photos have to exist somewhere else.

I'm not too familiar with Yahoo photos -- are you sure that wouldn't work? You should be able to grab a photo's URL if you can see it on a web page (for example, right-click on a photo and open the photo itself in a new window -- that will show the exact URL of the photo.) I suppose Yahoo could be making dynamic URLs. Mac users with a .Mac account have a nice place they can upload photos to, but I haven't taken a look to see what other services are out there. A lot of ISP's will provide personal web space where folks can upload photos.

A couple cautions about the photo embedding feature: Everyone should be sensitive about copyrights and not link to photos that are copyrighted. Also, the photos will be fetched from the server they're hosted on (e.g., not DCSki's server), so you might check with the server operator to make sure it's OK first if it's not your own photo on your own web site. I've caught many other sites embedding a DCSki photo directly on their web page, without giving any indication of where the photo came from. Each time someone viewed their web page, it would fetch the photo from my server, ultimately slowing down DCSki's server. Not so polite!

Longer term, I'm considering adding a feature on DCSki that would allow visitors to upload and host photos directly on the DCSki server. But, that can be dangerous to do, and DCSki's server is getting low on disk space and somewhat geriatric generally. In the past, it has been suggested that we allow readers to optionally make a small contribution to the site, receiving recognition and extra features in return. I have no plans of going to a subscription model, but if we did have some type of optional "contributing member" plan, photo space on the DCSki server could possibly be one of the perks (and keep a flood of people from overwhelming the server.)

I am entertaining the thought of radically re-designing DCSki this summer. It would be a major undertaking, and I'm not sure I'll have the time or money. But I mined a lot of great ideas from the recent DCSki Survey and am eager to hear more. For the past several years, I've grown somewhat frustrated with design decisions I made in the late 90's, so there's a lot of things I want to improve. But there's hundreds of news articles in the archives, and migrating them to a new infrastructure and layout would be laborious, so that's one reason I've been procrastinating.

Thanks,

- Scott

Go to biglines.com. You can upload photos there and link them to here. It's really simple but for my computet, can take a little while to do.

Well... for starters you can get away with 'cheating' Geocities out of webspace.

Simply sign-up for a free membership at http://www.geocities.com and upload your pictures.

Now go into your File Manager and check the files you uploaded. Click the rename button and change all the extensions to .txt. Now remote linking of the 'pictures' should work.

Canaanman and Scott:

I tried Geocities and it would not let me rename image files as .txt files. Their new java editor does not allow it for whatever reason. Yahoo photos put all sorts of strange extensions on its files to prevent this type of linking, although it does allow people to view photos by going to:

Johnfmh's Photo Album via Yahoo

But I can not imbed photos directly into this forum with Yahoo Photos.

I'll now try NCSkier's suggestion, and post my thoughts on this service later. I'd like to be able to recommend a good service for others who want to share ski photos on this forum. For example, I'd enjoy seeing a Canaanman description of Cherry Glades complete with photos. Now that would be COOL.

Actually... this should work. If you create an account with Geocities, then log-in, and find the area on the left marked 'Advanced Toolbox' you can upload and rename files. Just use the Easy Upload link, select your files, then after the upload is complete, click on the FileManager link. You may have to click a 'Launch FileManager' link or something on the next page, or maybe not, I don't quite remember. Either way, you'll end up in your File Manager and you should see all the files on your webspace. Check the box(es) to the left of the desired file(s) and click the Rename button either at the top or the bottom. Now, a new screen will appear and it will prompt you what you want to rename your files to. Anything with a .txt extension will work. Now, go back to the File Manager, click on the name of the file and copy that address from the address bar.

Using the [IMG] tags you can put that picture into a response. Ex: [IMG ]http://www.geocities.com/macsuwv/burtonlego.txt[/IMG ] just remove the spaces after the G in IMG to get something like this:

Canaanman:

This is a test link from yahoo photos. My question now is:

Is this a dynamic link that will change frequently, rendering this link useless or is it a permanent URL?

Maybe Scott can look at this URL and answer this question.

If Yahoo Photos works, I will continue to use that service. I've had very good luck developing digital photos through them as well (their sub contractor is shutterfly).

John,

It looks like that is a temporary link, and while it worked for me a minute ago, it's not working now.. Guess they're going out of their way to make sure the images can't be used in this way.

I just set up an official web blog ( here using a software package called Movable Type, which is pretty impressive.) The same company that makes Movable Type has a service called TypePad that allows one to set up their own blog, upload photos, etc. Looks like it's as cheap as $50 per year. That's more than free, of course, but it might be an option for some, especially those interested in also having a blog.

Most cable modem users should have access to free web space as part of their plan. (I'm pretty sure Comcast does this.) So that may be a good option for some.

These are only intermediate solutions; I will look into options for hosting photos directly on DCSki. I know how to implement it, but need to consider what the policy will be and whether my server can support it on a large scale. I think I will need to limit it somehow to registered DCSki readers that I trust; if I allowed any random person to upload files to the server that could have security and copyright implications.

Ok, I'm going to use Canaanman's method to link from geocities. Hope this works..

This picture, if it shows up, is Idjoch station (2760 meters) at Ischgl.