Our Gallery

[ezdays]

Just a heads-up, but we are experiencing a few problems with our Gallery right now. We are not sure what the problem is, so we are in a quandary about how to solve it. In the meantime, we are recommending that you do not add any new images to the Gallery until we tell you otherwise. Like our old chat room, the gallery is an add-on to our forum software and therefore is subject to being abandoned and unsupported. When that happens, it is possible that it is no longer compatible with newer versions of our forum software.

What you should do, rather than linking to images in the Gallery, just attach them directly to your post, or link them to a photo server website like Photobuckets.

We are working on it and will keep you posted on our progress. We appreciate your understanding and patience.

[ezdays]

Two things, if you get an "access denied" large icon where there should be a photo that is linked to our Gallery, you might try clearing your browser's cache and history, that worked for me. Secondly, I advise everyone to stay away from our Gallery for now. Viewing some images can cause you to get a, "connection was reset" error and resulting in being locked out of Big Blue for around ten or more seconds. We are working on the problem, but in the meantime, just ignore the Gallery until we fix things there.

[ezdays]

Here's an update on our gallery. We have found the problem and have implemented a workaround since there is no real solution. Packey thinks that the gallery with almost 5000 images in it, could be maxing out. Apparently, when someone opened the gallery and started viewing photos in it, our server saw that as a denial of service and shut down. Yup, the whole server shuts us down for some 15 seconds and will keep us locked out for as long as we keep searching the gallery database. There are a few changes that Packey made that relieves that condition for now, but..... we are still asking that we avoid putting anything new in the gallery since we don't know what the limit really is and if the next problem will cause the gallery or Big Blue to crash and we lose a bunch of photos. It's OK to look around now, just don't add anything for now.

We are looking into adding a second gallery that is not dependent on the first one and uses different software.The photos in the gallery now will remain there and the gallery will become read-only so we won't lose anything that's there now. In the meantime, we ask you to either use a photo sharing site like Photobuckets to link to, or you can attach your photos to you posts.

Mikey, I and the staff thank you for your understanding, these things happen at times as does unexpected glitches in the software.

[ezdays]

After careful review of our gallery, we have decide to make it read-only from this point on, essentially, locking it from anyone adding images to it. We have determined that the number of gallery images, although not yet reaching 5000, is a burden on our server, and accessing it can, and has, caused a "denial of service" error. This has caused our server to shut down access to our forums for a short period of time. Our gallery software is no longer being supported either, and so we thought about adding another gallery to supplement the one we have, but then it would result in the same problem down the line. We have left all the current images intact and they can still be viewed and linked to. You just cannot add a new album or add to an existing one.

There are just too many photo-sharing sites that we can use to link to, such as Photobucket, Instagram, Pintrest and others, that having a Gallery has become redundant as well as an unnecessary overhead that can cause more problems in the future if we don't shut it off now.

If anyone is having problems viewing images in the Gallery, or may need to delete something, let either myself or Mikey know and we'll do what we can to help you.

We regret having to do this, it was handy to have the gallery here, but seeing the problems that it caused a few weeks ago, we cannot take the risk of it shutting us down again, or acting weird by restricting access to some images and not others. We hope you understand.

[railohio]

For those seeking outside hosting, there is an active railfan community on flickr, which I strongly recommend as a substitute photo gallery.