Re: Splash screen contest

[David Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi,

Thomas Wood wrote:
> Since it seems unlikely we'll be able to use the CGI scripts, I've 
> created a stub on the wiki for a contest.
> 
> http://live.gnome.org/GnomeArt_2fSplashScreenContest
> 
> If people could add anything that I've missed off, then I can announce 
> it on art.gnome.org when it's ready.

Ah, well, the folly of youth.

The wiki is not appropriate for this kind of competition if you
ask people to attach their art-work. If you ask them to link to
their art-work, it could work, but if it gets slashdotted, you're
still in for huge concurrency issues - the wiki is not intended
for 100 people or more editing the same page at the same time.

I know Jeff's not particularly worried about that, but I have no
capital invested either way. If you're happy using the wiki with
external links, and the wiki sysadmins are happy too, then fine.

The CGI scripts are really simple. For submissions, all that you 
do is upload, save, write a row in a table in the database. I 
think there's a thumbnail generation in there too...

The gallery is really straightforward - you read the table in the
database, and dump HTML based on it. All images are served
statically. The only server side work is the database.

They have also withstood at least 2 slashdottings until now,
which is a testament to their robustness.

I can understand the gnome.org sysadmins wanting to security
audit things - particularly after last March - so perhaps it
would be best top run this on another web server.

The alternative that someone mentioned recently is to manually
manage the entries via a mailing list. For GUADEC abstracts, this
can work fine. For the logo competition, which had a relatively
small number of entries (around 100), it made the mailing list
unusable for a month, and took one person 2 full days to collate
the lot into one page afterwards. I really don't think this would
be a workable solution for a competition with potential mass
appeal.

As I said to Toady though when he asked, competitions like this
usually get done because someone announces a sub-optimal 
solution, and then in the crisis it's all hands on deck. That's 
what happened for the GIMP splash contest. I hope it's avoidable, 
though :)

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
        David Neary,
        Lyon, France
   E-Mail: bolsh gimp org
CV: http://dneary.free.fr/CV/