posted on Mar, 14 2009 @ 09:52 AM
ATS and its imagery problem...explicitly with regards to the UFO forum (though could just as easily be applied to many others) and the media
portal.
This is something that has been bugging me for a while now and to be honest I think it could be handled better with a little effort.
Very little effort in some cases.
To be frank, Image and video related threads are handled horribly.
I have lost count of the number of threads purporting to present majestic evidence of something or other on ATS only to find that upon browsing that
particular thread ... Dum, Dum, Dum! Ta DAAA!!
It's a Photo, Video or whatever that has been previously gutted in at least 1000 other threads... damn, another waste of time thread.
Some may say, that's what the search function is for....
But..umm... well, actually. No, it's not.
The search function relies on words, not images and Images is something the main forums do not do.
Everyone's description of any particular image is going to vary (to a huge degree in some cases) resulting in an infinite number of possible
interpretations of the same thing.
(OMG, It's a bird, it's a plane, it's George Bush with wings, It's a hot naked angel chick reincarnated as the ghost of my yucca tree,
whatever..)
In a lot of cases the imagery is the point of the thread.
Not the descriptions or the interpretations which have already been made..
A thumbnail or a pop-up with the thread title would at least give us an idea, especially when it comes to the search function.... please!
Even if it was a store bought feature, I'd sure as hell spend the points.
Images on the media portal are even easier to deal with.
Why can't we link a thread to an image? At the minute it seems any
thread relevant to a media piece cannot be referred to directly by the
media portal. It has to be referred to in a comment and that's just silly.
A primary thread reference by the creator of the image would be somewhat handy too...
Absence.
[Edit: Heres another one... since ATS's motto is deny ignorance, Is there an explicit reason as to why there are no forum subsections dealing with
educational facts? E.g. The UFO forum (again) deals with photography to a large degree, yet there is nothing present to educate members as to the
nature of photographic anomaly resulting in the same mistakes being presented again and again and again and again...
Ignorance of a subject self perpetuates but if ATS's claim to denying that ignorance is to be taken seriously then we have a moral obligation to
educate and there is noting here to divide the two.]
[edit on 14-3-2009 by Absence of Self]