Thomas de Groot <tho### [at] degrootorg> wrote:

> Aside: There are so many goodies produced by the community over the
> years that many tend to get lost. A pity indeed. I am not sure what we
> can do about this...

Yes, we certainly have a LOT of archived material that if nothing else, needs to
be centralized and indexed.

Perhaps if we had a wiki page or used some other forum / image page / etc
(solely due to recent spam) then perhaps a few starter pages could be
established with code and a sample image, and proper semantic versioning for the
filenames.
V1.0 for all / the last version of the original

Then maybe interested folks could clean up the original code, decipher things,
and add clarifying comments.   V2.0

Sometimes it only comes down to a clever trick, an interesting snippet of code,
or a well implemented piece of math/geometry that would be more generally useful
as a function or a macro.  That could be snipped out and encapsulated, and
hopefully get rolled into the Insert Menu, which would really help save them and
make them accessible.

I know certain forums allow things like polls and voting - perhaps if someone
knows of something like that which we can use, then maybe there can be some sort
of automated dump from the POV-Ray website to generate the initial threads, and
then things can be sorted into material to be deleted (it still remains where we
got it from - include an index entry with a hyperlink), "don't know what it is -
investigate further", back burner stuff, and things that are promising to be
developed (based on votes).
There's likely going to be a lot of "here's an image that we'd love to know how
to make, but the source was lost / never provided" - can someone figure out how?


Maybe Mr. Balaska can give us an idea of the volume of material archived on the
server in GB (sans images).


Then maybe just to make a simple, fun, easily participated in game - there could
be a "find the coolest [remaining] historical post" to get people to dig through
the pile, render scenes (in 3.8), and release the worms from the can.  :)

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