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  Re: [Aroid-l] ID Help
From: a sunjian <asjbiotek at gmail.com> on 2014.07.31 at 15:06:59(23041)
I think there are some positives and negatives to using facebook.

On the positive side:

1. there are quite a few people who do use facebook on an almost daily basis.

2. uploading and commenting on images is relatively easy.

3. almost negligible work is needed on aroid people's part in maintaining the images and page. facebook has basically provided the framework for the process.

On the negative side:

1. there are still many people who don't use facebook, or who refuse to use it. I should also note facebook is blocked in certain countries (I believe China for example, though i don't think the IAS has members there).

2. The IAS has no control long term over the page. In other words, facebook could shut down the page for whatever reason they want in future and that's pretty much that. All that work would go down the drain.

3. The facebook page system works well for a small number of images, but for very large databases it becomes unwieldy because of lack of certain capabilities...for example, a search function. It wasn't meant to be a long term database of anything.

Having the aroid ID center as hundreds or even thousands of manually coded HTML pages is pretty hard work, and we should all commend Marek for the work he's done, but a possible long term solution such as a database-driven system HOSTED on an IAS web account is probably better since less work on the part of volunteers is needed. To get people to use that, people should be encouraged to upload their images onto that system and then simply POINT to it on facebook via links or whatever.

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