Hey everyone, what do you think of having a separate thread dedicated to each of our portfolios?
Perhaps our administrator can set-up such a subject in a maner to allow us to create the individual builder portfolios? That would be a tool to allow each of us to archive all of our builds in one location. Other members can view them and post a comment but cannot post thiers into your portfolio.
In theory, each builder creates thier own portfolio page. Once we are done with our build in the specific subject or GB we would then add 1-3 photos of it in it our own portfolio. This would allow everyone the opportunity to view each others work in one location. They can use that location for reference, inspiration, darts, etc.
Excellent question, Stik! You may be right-that feature may be the gallery we’re talking about.
And as far as uploading goes, that’s an excellent question, too. When I go to my Your Photos page, I see a message that says, “the Baron hasn’t uploaded any photos yet.” Not, “You haven’t”, but referring to me in the third person, as if I were some other user, not the owner of the page. What I expected to see was some link to use to add photos.
This is a good question for the moderators/admins-How does “Your Photos” work?
It just occurred to me that maybe “Your Photos” shows photos that someone has submitted to the Readers Galleries area of the forum.
I did a search in the meantime, on “your photos”, which returned a lot of hits, but a quick scan of them turned up no specific posts asking about that feature. That makes me think even more that we should ask how it works. Maybe it resolves this thread’s request, or maybe we’ll just learn something about the forum, that we didn’t know before.
I would think that any new modifications to the current site would never happen seeing as they seem to have their hands full in getting it to run correctly now with what they currently have.
So, this is a little complicated, but I’ll do my best to explain it. For years, submitting photos to the FSM Reader Gallery through the website meant that the photos would be routed to an associate editor. That editor would go through the submissions, choose some for the print edition and the rest would be moved to another editor whose responsibility it was to upload the rest onto the online Reader Gallery. In fact, for about four years, that was one of my responsibilities.
This is why you see Elizabeth’s name beneath photos in the Online Reader Gallery; or mine; or if you go back further, Megan and Kelly’s.
But that means the ability to upload photos directly to the Reader Gallery is restricted to staff. Over on Scale Auto, because we didn’t run a Reader Gallery in the print magazine, there was no reason to insert editorial into the mix except to moderate submissions.
Can we change that? Possibly. But that would mean a major change to FSM’s internal workflow. Expecting readers to submit in two different places will not work, and we have too much to do already to go hunting through archived photos to populate Reader Gallery. Being at the mouth of the river, as it were, is best. So, the staff would have to dig into that first.
Then we would need to open a ticket with our web development department. I don’t know if that’s simply flicking a soft switch or requires some coding. From how it’s written into our website, I’m going to assume the latter.
Third, our web development department is in the middle of a huge, months long lift with Discover, Astronomy, and all of our tracks titles: Trains, Model Railroader, Classic Trains, Classic Toy Trains, and MRVP and the work on the omnibus website Trains.com. That’s why it takes longer than we would typically expect for bugs to be worked out on the Forum right now. Resources and manpower are tight, and we have to work with what we have.
Often, what appears to be an easy change from the outside, even to the trained eyes of software testers and engineers and career web developers, is more complicated once you’re on the other side.
My main concern right now is to get all the little hiccups that we’ve been experiencing straightened out. Still, we’ll endeavor to get the bugs worked out and consider ways to improve the FSM Forum.
TL/DR: We can look at it, but it’s not on the docket anytime soon.
No worries on our end. I simply wanted to be upfront with Stik and Baron. Your suggestion of a separate “room” to post in, again, would require us to start the ball rolling with our web devs. And right now they’re up to their eyeballs in high-priority items at the moment.
Again, any additional time we get from web dev I want spent on making sure the Forum is running. Once we get these bugs worked out, we can look at other options.
In the first and second paragraphs of my initial response. My “Your Photos” section has all of the photos I uploaded to the online Reader Gallery over the years that it was my responsibility. If you were able to post directly to it, the photos you uploaded would appear in “Your Photos”.