I don't appreciate being laughed at. The least you guys can do is fix them.
Believe me, there is nothing I wish more than to be able to fix every single non-working cover in the site, but in a lot of cases we no longer have a working copy. we have seen lately that covers get uploaded, and then show up as corrupted. In some instances the cover is lost for good and we can not replace it until the original artist re-uploads a new version of it.
The reason for my sarcasm is that you are pointing out something that we clearly already know about.
Seriously - you guys need to get with the program, drop this whole custom-built CMS that Snowcone knocked together on his own, and go with something like Drupal. Go with something tested and proven - I honestly do not get why there needs to be this overcomplication by going with a homegrown solution that obviously does not do the work most of the time and needs a lof of maintenance and manual labor.
Like - for instance - the whole uploading process - I understand this is quite a pain. Quite simply, this is inexcusable for ANY CMS by ANY hallmark - this stuff needs to be transparent and as simple as clicking on the Quit button of your PC.
For instance - my uploaded covers have been sitting in the 'Uploads' section for over a month now - ready to be uploaded for over a month now - simply because nobody wants to take the time to 'publish' these covers - or because it's too 'time consuming', or because something goes wrong during the uploading process. I mean, what the hell? What is so overly complex about this stuff that a cover can't be added in a manner of seconds? You know, you can install something like Ruby on Rails, set up 'scaffolding' and you'll have CRUD functionality within a matter of seconds or minutes.
Cover adding would be much less time intesive if people would make their covers perfect before uploading them. Just for your info Dante I allready went thorugh all your covers and they are all ready for publishing but I have to check about some descriptor stuff with snow before adding them.
Besides most of your covers where work for me you know. I suppose you didn't invest too much time in cleaning them and so it makes life complicated for an admin. Especially because the scans are not that stellar to begin with and so shaprening them was almost impossible. I just would like you to know that if those weren't your covers and you weren't a respected memeber of our community(in my eyes) some of those covers would have just been deleted by me. So I invested some hours to finish tidying them up....
To sum it up adding the covers isn't sooooo much work but making them shiny and perfect is....
Besides we had an empty upload queue several times since the beginning of the cover project....
Inbetween switching between scanners I guess I didn't enable the 'Despeckle' option (FYI, it's called 'Despeckle' in most Linux imaging software - not Descreen). Anyway, I scan them in at 600dpi and because descreening is only needed on dotted print, I'm not going to enable it on covers that are not printed on dotted paper because otherwise you lose detail.
Anyway, I try to invest a lot of time in these covers so I guess you could say I am a little taken aback by what you said. In what way were these covers 'not that stellar'? Could you list some examples? Either the quality requirements have been increased and I haven't noticed but I can't really notice my covers looking inferior to the ones I upload previously back when I began here. I mean, I scan them in at 600dpi, apply the 'Descreen'/'Despeckle' option wherever possible - I remove the dust and fix the colours - and yet each and everytime I get told by you my covers are basically rubbish and would have been deleted except for the fact I have been given a badge???
Why can't someone put up a tutorial somewhere where it's specifically defined what you guys look for? Because somehow this Quality Assurance process has to be made concrete - I'm trying to the best of my ability to make these covers look good but if you guys are looking for things that I'm not told about previously or can read about in a tutorial - then it will be necessary for a few 'cover admins' to touch all these covers up.
Anyway, what would you prefer me to do? Scan at 800dpi instead of 600dpi and then downscale from there? I'm scanning with an Epson Perfection V300 Photo - I assume that's good enough ?
So if you want - I can re-scan them again and run them through you.
