Dear GRM-Please start hosting photos

I would think that there is some plugin for the boards software to tie-in to something like Imgur.

Grtechguy wrote: I would think that there is some plugin for the boards software to tie-in to something like Imgur.

I was thinking the same thing as you (and MrJoshua)

Maybe have the board tie into imgur's API for commercial use? Costs money but it could be worth looking into. The $25/mo package might do the job.

https://api.imgur.com/

Bigger link/image/smiley icons would definitely help on mobile. I have to zoom up and pull the stylus out of my N900 to hit just the one I want, so I can see how they'd be a nightmare for you poor saps with capacitive touchscreens

Auto-embedding video and images that are already on the web is pretty straightforward. David, have your web guys talk to me, the code is open-source.

I agree on the icons. They were fine in their day, but their day is long past. They're due for an update. I've gone to text-based icons, which makes it SOOO much easier to resize them.

The API idea has legs, too. Long ago, we picked up a Flickr tag to show all images tagged with #grm2008 (or whatever it was). But that was a long, long time ago, and it never really worked as well as I wanted it to. I mean, getting the images was no problem. Getting them uploaded to one particular service and tagged correctly was the issue. So, my question would be, what does that API look like to end users?

I also suspect it would be FAR easier and work much better -- especially with the API idea -- to upload the photos to the event, not the board. Boards are really, really terrible at any sort of structured data, and "these photos go with this event" is definitely structured data.

SVreX wrote: In reply to Kylini: Yeah! Calling people dumb is surely a way to make the internet a better place. Are you really ready to stand on that and include people like Andrew, GTech, and Texas AM (some of the smartest people I know)? Nobody said they couldn't figure it out. We said it is annoying, and that other sites do it, and that we wish GRM would.

I was in rant mode and for that I apologize. I do think that GRM hosting years of photos of build threads, however, is something less than smart when most people would rather take control over their photo-hosting destinies.

If you upload something to Imgur, Flickr, Dropbox, or your own FTP dump, you can control the organization. You can then share them on any and every forum out there (Miata.net, those crazy 22RE Celica guys, your local SCCA region, etc.) with one upload. You can yank them with one delete action. You know exactly where to find them in the future provided your service still exists.

If GRM offered it and you upload your photos to GRM, you'd still have to upload it everywhere else. Those uploads would be tied to that given post and you'd have to upload again and again if you used the same photo elsewhere on GRM or on another site. Given our love for using pictures as replies, GRM would also be hosting tons of memes, funny pics, and, heavens help us, all future activity in the hotlink thread. Such a system would also severely constrain GRM's future forum updates, since maintaining and migrating a text and photo database is much more challenging than text alone.

Ultimately, people are complaining that GRM doesn't offer what everywhere else on the internet does and it costs the user--at most--an extra open webpage (to Imgur or whatever) and a copy-paste of a URL for each picture. Any effort spent organizing those pictures is optional. The idea that an extra 30 seconds to a minute of clicking (because you don't actually have to type anything) would keep someone from maintaining a build thread which already takes hours of working on the car, hours writing up the content, and minutes taking and uploading the photos doesn't make logical sense to me. You either want to take the time to share your progress with the world or you don't; the image hosting isn't the limiting factor in this system.

GRM's forum has quirks. I don't know why the formatting buttons use BBCode but the site actually uses some bastardized version of Markdown for italics, bold, etc. I don't know why image links are HTML but formatting isn't. I think it's hilarious when we accidentally trigger a CSS rule for h1, h2, h3, etc. just in normal writing. Making line breaks and bulleted lists is sometimes a nightmare. I have no idea why each post has voting or a report button when moderation is limited to "don't piss off the overlords" and "manually report things in the canoe thread." That said, it's very clean, very easy to find and share and participate, and is the most enjoyable and presentable forum I'm on. vBulletin is chintzy in comparison. Plus, we all know just how bad some custom forum software can be (SCCAForums anyone?). GRM does a bangup job.

The original poster inspired a side question: why does GRM staff push content to Facebook and not cross-post on the forum. I think this is a valid question. The marketing answer is easy: just compare pageviews, shares, and comments between the platforms; I'd only post on Facebook. The community answer is complicated: we don't want a new thread for every throwaway GRM upload but we would appreciate official photo/coverage threads of the $2015 Challenge and other bigger things. GRM has already done that for some magazine articles with mixed results (some have zero comments, some exploded). I think GRM should focus less on pushing articles and more on pushing events and content onto the forums, but that's just an opinion and it's their call.

My questions aren't even really related to the forum.... why is it when i go to grm/events, I can't find a way to see any past Challenge coverage, only future events. My expectation would be that for major events, the coverage of them would be there, and I could revisit them at any time. Further, could always find the photos, not like if they were all tied up in some forum thread that inevitably gets pushed back to wherever.

What I'd like is to see the Challenge that just happened, and then have the other Challenges in the DB related too, so I can see, for example, Andy Nelson's other efforts. And If the past event pix and coverage was reachable, it's relatively -- at least compared to the forum -- easy to tap into some APIs to add additional pix. Relatively easy, anyway.

I don't even think the forum is the right place for event pix, but I do wonder why I can't get to them at all.

Kylini wrote: I have no idea why each post has voting or a report button when moderation is limited to "don't piss off the overlords" and "manually report things in the canoe thread."

FYI, I think that's incorrect. We've been asked to hit the report button instead of calling canoe.