Timewaster's Guide Archive
General => Suggestions Box => Topic started by: Mad Dr Jeffe on April 21, 2003, 07:17:30 PM
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Hey its the 21'st century Everybody else is just doing plain text reviews. You guys get books and products straight from the manufacturers. Could we ask if photos or excerpts can be used in the review if they dont give away any serious mechanics...?
Just brainstorming...
Jeffe
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This is about the 4th time this topic has poped up and while most of us agree it would be nice we've never been able to work out a system that would work the way we wanted. Maybe if we start up out weekly meetings again we'd hammer something out.
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Well, for now, if you just wanted to put a picture of me in place of a product picture I think it would serve as a good placeholder.
Might get some more ladies around here too ;)
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Sprig is right we have tried numerous time to get picts with reviews. As I remember, the past complaints have been:
1. coding for picts,
2. lack of people knowing how to prep picts and having time to prep them,
3. getting the picts to mesh with the site design,
4. copyright issues,
5. figuring out a system of submitting and uploading images.
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Numbers 3 and 4 aren't as serious, but that pretty much sums it up. Pictures are awesome, and if anyone wants to be the graphics prep man I'll hire you on the spot, but it's a lot of work and thus far we simply haven't had anyone with the time to do it.
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what do you use for your page out of curiosity?
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PHP.
One more that Tage just informed me of is that our bandwith has been cut by more then half. So if we do upload pictues and the site gets more popular that will cause a problem.
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Half ? wow that sucks. Well yopu could just do pics for the initial article and then drop them after a week, But then again...
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Right now it wont cause much of a problem, it more of an if we get a lot more popular. Of course if that happens Fell would probaly find some way to generate some revinue and we could probaly pay for more bandwith. But Tage just told me this yesterday.
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I suppose I could stop paying people to carry me around, and use that money to buy more bandwidth...but I don't think my poor feet could handle it. They've grown accostomed to never feeling the unholy caress of carpet.
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LOL, I love how Spriggan just pulls stuff out of his cornhole.
I said I have to downgrade the server. I will have *less* bandwidth and space available, but I didn't say by how much, and it won't impact TWG at all.
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you told me half last night
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Ok. Here it goes. At home, i have, at the last count, 3 digital cameras, 2 flatbed scanners and 3 pro level image programs.
So, if i were to, say, review a RPG i could not only scan the front and back (and the spine - could show what teh entire cover looks like in one continuous pic) but could take digi snaps of inside pages. This shows how nice the cover is and what the inside of the book is like.
I think that the easiest way of making pictures work is to simply store them on the server and use HTML code to link them as [img] type thingies.
Any comments?
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Covers are probably okay, but be VERY careful when taking shots of inside the book. If any text contents are legible, we could possibly get sued for copyright infringement.
One good way to prevent this from happening, though, is to write and submit the review, but not have Fell post it publicly until it's been approved by the copyright holders. That way, you could even get text in there, as long as the company agreed with sharing that information.
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It would be easier to just not take internal shots. I don't think we'd be missing much. Also, I think an entire pic of both covers and the spine is sort of overkill.
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It would be easier to just not take internal shots. I don't think we'd be missing much.
ACtually, i would vastly prefer a picture of the inside. I want to know how the book is set out, how it looks and how pictures and sidebars are used. That is all information that a single picture can conviegh instantly.
Also, I think an entire pic of both covers and the spine is sort of overkill.
Why settle for less ;)
If any text contents are legible, we could possibly get sued for copyright infringement.
Or simply make sure that the picture is sufficiently zoomed out so that the main body of text is un-readable.
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That's a good idea. We also have the option of blurring the text in photoshop.
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I could start E-mailing pics of books that I review as attachments if you want. Or all pictures for review could be submitted in a forum here.
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Need I remind people that all images are also copyrighted, this includes the cover of a book. Often the copyright to a cover of a book is held by the artist and not the publisher.
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But you can run pictures and quotes as part of a review.
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I just sent in a coded review For Maelstrom with pictures and links to PDFs from their website. The game expressly states that excerpts can be used for reviews. So I'm confident its ok.
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Saint, in reviewing my handbook on copyright laws, where does it say that reviews can use pictures from a product? My sources tell me that you can't simply because it is a review of something. For example, I know newspapers have to get permission from artists to reproduce any images for a review of a gallery exhibit. So anyways, if you could show me where it says that I would like to know. It would also save me a lot of time dealing with some of the artists I work with currently.
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uh... I haven't reviewed your handbook on copyright laws, 42.
It seems absurd if you can't reproduce anything though, even to review the art itself. However, we have lots of absurd laws, so it wouldn't surprise me. What about layout? Can you do that? What about the sample pages provided on places like Amazon?
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humm I was looking at your Malstrom review ElJeffe and a few of the picture links are bad. The pictures up top are ok but as far as that large of pictures in the middle of the review, we should use thumb nails. Or at least something the size of the covers that you posted with a link to the larger image.
One more thing...Alwayse double check the deparment you're submitting it to. I don't think this is a Video game ::)
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There are 4 at the top and a map, and thats all the pic links. The other links are for PDF's availible at Hubris Games main site. But again they worked for me.
It got put in the wrong place accidentally.
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If you guys can come to some sort of agreement regarding copyright issues and bandwidth consumption, showing pictures in reviews is itself an extremely simple task to accomplish. There are all sorts of super-fancy ways to handle it in PHP/MySQL with very little effort, but you could even just stick a simple HTML tag in the article text, and have reviewers e-mail Fellfrosch (or somebody) an image to be FTP'd to the appropriate directory on the server.
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It may be easy but it's hard to get Tage to get off his butt to code it. That's one of the main reasons why we've never done it. The other is copyright/layout issues.
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Be nice, Sprig.
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wow...wait...do I know you? Anyway you didn't get the sarcastic tone to the "Tage's Butt" part. ;D
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Coding isn't necessary at all if you just do it the lazy-man's way. Just have reviewers put an image tag -- like <img src="http://www.timewastersguide.com/reviewerimages/myfile.jpg"> -- at the appropriate spot in their review, for instance. Sure, its slighty less professional looking, but it also gives the reviewers control of image placement in their reviews.
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I don't like that way. If forces people with dial-ups to download large graphics. And eats up bandwith.
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Brian has the right idea. When I completely rewrote the site, it was with the idea that we'd give much greater control and flexibility to the admins and authors. Unfortunately, we soon discovered that the admins and authors didn't really know what to do with that flexibility. Hence, most of the department pages look like crap, and no one ever does anything interesting with the reviews.
Yeah, remember the cool little thing where you can put clock images by putting ###score=8###? Haven't seen it used in ages.
At this point I'm not sure where the balance between automation and flexibility is.
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Well Tage, as I mentioned earlier there are some simple things you can do in-code to make it easier (and more obvious) for people to add pics. But the others around here seem to think you are too lazy to code it. :)
And Spriggan -- the simple method I mentioned is going to consume bandwidth just as much as any other method. If you have pictures on a page, bandwidth is required to download them, regardless of what method you use to display them. Although most dial-up users should be used to the idea that it'll take some time to download large images. The text is going to display in the meantime anyway, so it's not going to affect their ability to read the review.
Of course, you could always 1) require that <img>'s are no larger than, say, 300x200, or 2) tell people to use <a href="URL/image.jpg"> tags instead of <img> tags, which will of course let them decide whether or not to click on the link and display the image.
If you guys decided to allow reviewers to add pics via a simple method like this, you should have a note somewhere on the Review submission page explaining how to do this.
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I used that in the webpage review Tage ;D
And Brian if the pictures are thumbnails or on another page (like gamespot) then the bandwith isn't used unless people want to see them. I personaly don't need screen shots when I read a review. I can understand it for Wargams and videogames, but the push here is for RPG books! Now that's a waste if I've ever seen one.
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Spriggan, check out my earlier comments regarding RPg piccies.
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I know what your comments are and I still think it's not worth the time. But the last say is Fell's and Tage's not mine.
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I don't particularly care whether reviews have screenshots or not. It might be nice to see what a product looks like, but its not critical. I was just trying to point out that there are simple options for achieving that objective if fell decides it would be a good idea.
And the thumbnails is probably the best way to do it -- it is very easy with PHP to auto-generate thumbnails.
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Tage's pretty familiar with PHP so I'm sure he knows about that. My knowledge is limited to what I use with flash. The biggest problem we've got is the copyright. Which we've never figured out. Next is implementing it in a way we like. And that includes getting the pictures onto the site. I don't think any of the admins want to be contatly uploading pictures. And I know Tage dosen't want to give everyone file access, even if it is limited to pictures.
So as Tage said this site is very flexable but we're all too lazy to do anything with it. Or in my case lazy and not talent. If you've seen the Video Game page then you know what I'm talking about.