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MG MG Y Type - Photos in BBS

Altough this site really works great for our communication and is also a valuable information source, it has a little drawback: you cannot share pictures. On the other hand, there exist two Yahoo groups with the MG theme. There you have the possibility of uploading photos. These groups are rather inactive (to say the least) at the moment, so my suggestion would be: use one of these groups to show and share pictures. You can either attach a photo to your message, which albeit will not be stored for later reference, or upload it to the "photos" section, where it will remain permanently. In this BBS here, a reference would have to be given to any new pics in Yahoo.
Please have a look at these groups and give your opinion about my idea.
http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/mgmagic
http://autos.groups.yahoo.com/group/mgowners
Remo Peter

I've always hated that about this site. No HTML or Smart Tags allowed. Sometimes it's nice to simply display a picture instead of linking to it.
Steve Simmons

As you all may know, these pages are actually hosted and controlled by www.mgcars.org.uk, who very kindly also allow us to share them on this website. (They are also our very kind site hosts and do many wonderful things for us too)

I have discussed this matter with Mike Plumstead and we would like to make the following statement as to why we do not allow the file transfer and display of photographs.

"Unfortunately we cannot police images. Words we can check for certain content and exclude them. A pornographic image looks the same as a Y type to the computer. Therefore, we only allow linking to images."

This policy is fully in agreement with the Register's own policy, and we are very happy to endorse and approve it.

Sorry to all the genuine users, but this is the sad world we live in, where the minority spoil the fun for the majority.

On the plus side, we do have our website at www.mgytypes.org where I have more time to control the images and content against such abuse. On technical issues etc. where a photograph or schema can be useful, we have added these in the past and will continue to do so.

We hope this helps.

Paul and Mike
Paul Barrow

Paul and Mike,

Although I can't begin to thank you both for your hard work and respect your position on this issue, I have to disagree with your reasoning.

If this BBS was meant for my children maybe I would agree, but as it's meant for MG-enthousiasts who are almost by definition adults, the chance that a participant in a thread is too shocked by a dirty picture, is rather small. I too don't like it when I search for MG on a search engine and all kinds of stimulating pills (it is weighed mg's), roll over the screen. But that is the Internet, isn't it?

If I want, I can link any dirty picture on the Internet in this thread right now. The problem is that I can not do that easily with my Y-pictures (except off course for this one!:
http://www.mgcars.org.uk/mgccy/ysonparade/y5888.jpg

I strongly think that the need for an easy way to display pictures to illustrate a problem on this BBS is much greater than the minute risk of somebody actually linking a pornographic picture.

If it's technically hard, to expensive or even impossible I can live with that, but don't use the abuse-effect because there's always the "Please report abuse immediately"-link in every thread.

Please reconsider?!
Willem van der Veer

Are British laws so severe that the person running the BBS can be made responsible for any illegal content, or would some sort of disclaimer relieve him of that? Or is there outright censorship?
Anyway, I would like to know if you could consider the Yahoo "byway" as an alternative.
There are also groups on Yahoo about Fiats (my other classic being a 124 Coupé), and I have never come across any porn pics there - guess there is simply no interest.
Remo Peter

I fully respect any decisions made by the owners of a BBS since it is their property and responsibility. However my opinion also differs after many years of using dozens (or more) of BBS, forums and groups. I even spend time on hardware and game forums which are almost entirely made up of young males between 12 and 24 years of age. Even there you never see such images and if there is a link of that type, it is displayed as a link, not an image which is something you can do here anyway!

I think the chances of anything unpleasant happening are extremely slim and if I were running this BBS I would definately consider allowing images to be displayed in postings. However I don't run this BBS and as I said before I respect the decisions of those who do.
Steve Simmons

Never say never, but for now,not just yet.

Please remember that Mike is running the BBS for us - absolutely free of charge. You can upload URLs to other sites of course. It is not a matter of censorship, but one of practicality. Mike has loads of other MG related BBSs to run, as well as hosting, free to the likes of this Register, and countless other MG sites.

I think he is a marvelous chap and dread to think where we'd be without him. Certainly we, as a Register, could never afford to have such an extensive and exhaustive site, with the volumes of traffic we do, if we had to pay anything, never mind a commercial rate.

Please also remember that we have, on several times, been visited by unwelcome and unpleasant entries on the BBS which Mike and I have taken down as soon as we have become aware of them.

I have nothingbut praise and admiration for Mike and his team and will support his decision on this unfalteringly. Sorry it that upsets people, but we have to be practical about this.

Best wishes,

Paul
Paul Barrow

No hard feelings whatsoever! But there's no harm in exchanging views, is there?
Willem van der Veer

For some other views regarding this subject and reasons for not having pictures on the site, see the same thread on the TD/TF BBS. Cheers - Dave
David DuBois

I wouldn't expect a BBS owner to host pictures on the server since I wouldn't want to deal with that myself. It's a lot of storage and maintenance. However, allowing smart tags or simple HTML would be of great use. For example, if you wanted to link to this thread you could type:

http://www2.mgcars.org.uk/cgi-bin/gen5?runprog=mgbbs&access=&mode=tlist&subject=13

...and it displays that way. Or you could use the [link] tag and it would look like this:

MG Y Thread

...(except clicking it would link to this thread just as the massive one above does.

Also, posting an image would be just as easy. No confusing links, just an image displaying on the page. It would be easy to prevent dial-up users from bogged down by installing a filter on the server to disallow any images over a certain size, such as 50k.

Just my 2 cents USD.
Steve Simmons

As a matter of interest Paul, did somebody work out a set of disallowed words for Le Forum des Francophones?

Nick

This thread was discussed between 01/05/2004 and 22/05/2004

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