Though I remember the resource before it was hosted at povray.org, I don't
think I ever used it.  The problem with these textures is perhaps that many of
them are too simple (it may take more time to look for them or even to
remember them than to make them again), or that they are not such an
improvement on the textures found on the standard pov distribution (that I do
use because they provide some basics, like wood or glass). Also, I always
noticed that textures that look fun often have little practical use, apart
being fun.
However, I think that such a resource would be extremely valuable if the
textures were of the less-obvious kind, and of a more scene-oriented kind :
complex textures in the lines of Jeff Lee's brick pattern or SamuelT's peeling
paint isosurface texture, that would include the combination of normals,
warps, pigment maps and texture maps required to do some hard stuff. This
would make life easier for every user, from newbies who could learn from it to
"advanced" ones who could save time. What about a "skyscraper at night"
texture, for instance ? Or a "dirty wall with some irregular bricks showing
beneath the cracked paint and rusty spots" texture. Or "dull texture with very
small dents very far apart"... BTW, I find that textures are better to figure
when in context : glass textures should be shown on bottles or glasses, wood
textures on simple pieces of furniture, stones texture on stone-like blobs or
bezier patches, slope_dependent textures on height-fields and so on. Just an
idea, but I do appreciate seeing that in Bryce, for instance (at least for the
stone and terrain textures).
So the answers are :

> 1.) Do you think this a useful resource in it's present form ?

No

> 2.) Do you think it would be a better resource if more people contributed
>     to it and the textures were updated to work correctly with the latest
>     versions of POV-Ray ?

Yes, but only if the textures are really good, useful, complex ones and not
other versions of the standard ones, which are already there.

> 3.) If this became a active resource for POV-Ray textures would you help
>     contribute to it ?

Yes

> 4.) Would you use the textures from this site in your scenes ?

Yes

> 5.) Should we just get rid of it because it serves no purpose, it's a dumb
>     idea, who cares anyway ?

No. I would actually advocate this type of resource for other stuff material,
like medias, objects, macros... (of course, we have already Uncle Ken's
links...).

G.

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