Eeek!
Will people never learn?
Twice in the past two days, people have proposed using the wiki for art competitions (splash and theme) for GNOME 2.10.
Please don’t use a wiki for an art competition. It doesn’t handle concurrency (at least moinmoin doesn’t), and it will die under heavy load. If the art contest gets slashdotted (and art contests, because the LCD can easily participate, tend to get slashdotted), you can kiss goodbye to the wiki for a couple of days, and you risk losing some good submissions lost simply because they got over-written.
The GIMP splash contest started out there, and I think that the GNOME sysadmin team will testify that that was an absolute and unmitigated disaster.
We moved to a CGI based solution on the GIMP web server pretty quickly (which yosh, Helvetix and carol had put in place, but which had been disabled around the time the website changed). This guaranteed that static pages were going to keep getting served, art submissions weren’t going to get lost, and when traffic died down, there would be no problems. Sure, some of those CGI requests failed when we were under slashdot load, but the webserver kept on ticking along.
That code is in the gimp-web CVS module, in the programmatic /contest directory, if anyone is interested.
Update Jeff – OK, whatever you think. I suspect that people will attach stuff inline anyway, and possibly that external material will change during the contest. Having data locally has lots of advantages, and having it remotely opens up a couple of cans of worms. But I guess it could work.
