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    1. Open source recommendations for a photo/post voting site?

      TLDR: I need a website that let's signed in users vote on each others photos, and stores that data on who voted for what in a database. Background I run a facebook group of about 2,000 members....

      TLDR:

      I need a website that let's signed in users vote on each others photos, and stores that data on who voted for what in a database.

      Background

      I run a facebook group of about 2,000 members. This group is designed for analog (any non-digital format) photographers to swap high quality artistic prints with each oter. The community was essentially dead and the admin wanted to throw in the towel so I took over. We've made progress, the group growth jumped by over 500% in the first month after I took over.

      Right now trading prints doesn't work well. People make a post using the facebook selling format, and those who are interested comment with the image they'd like to trade for. The problem is that the posts get limited visibility due to facebook's algorithms, and stale posts hang around. All of this reduces over all activity, and the majority of posts don't end up in a trade.

      My solution is to do a trade event with everyone participating at the same time. Since facebook doesn't lend itself to this I'd like to whip up a quick site for the event. My time is so limited these days I really don't have the capacity to build something from scratch, and the group certainly doesn't have any other developers to help out with it (it skews heavily on the older side).

      I'd like to find an open source project that lets users sign in (sign in using facebook would be a bonus) and upload/vote on images. After the voting closes, I'll write code to pair everyone up in a way that optimizes for everyone getting to make a trade. If Alice votes for Bob's image, and Bob votes for Alice's image, they would get paired up to make the swap.

      I feel okay writing the code to map out swaps, but I'm pretty terrible at web design and especially at front end design. I've looked across github, but I wanted to reach out and see if anyone could recommend something that I might of missed.

      I don't expect to have 2,000 members participate, I think it may be as few as under 100, so hopefully I won't need to worry about scale.

      Thanks in advance for the help!

      11 votes
    2. Weekly megathread for news/updates/discussion of Russian invasion of Ukraine - September 1

      This thread is posted weekly on Thursday - please try to post relevant content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Especially significant updates may warrant a separate topic,...

      This thread is posted weekly on Thursday - please try to post relevant content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Especially significant updates may warrant a separate topic, but most should be posted here.

      If you'd like to help support Ukraine, please visit the official site at https://help.gov.ua/ - an official portal for those who want to provide humanitarian or financial assistance to people of Ukraine, businesses or the government at the times of resistance against the Russian aggression.

      9 votes
    3. The Proverbial Pen #3

      Today is day three of my "war against writer's block"! As I keep fighting with my proverbial pen, I hope that some day I'll be able to get out of my block and be able to write some real stuff like...

      Today is day three of my "war against writer's block"!
      As I keep fighting with my proverbial pen, I hope that some day I'll be able to get out of my block and be able to write some real stuff like research paper or novel or story book.

      What I realized today is that Word Power is a very important skill. A writer is essentially a Wordsmith or someone who carves and arranges the words and phrases into sentences, just as a sculptor or carpenter would do with wood or other raw materials. To be a better writer, you must learn to fall in love with words which is probably easier said than done - especially for us non-native speakers!

      Having a regular habit or routine helps with this. Each time you come across a difficult word, you open the dictionary software or app and learn its meaning. It hardly takes a few minutes but it's a very useful skill as each new word you know of acts like a raw material or building block for your writing. Better still, develop linguistics as a hobby as mastery of grammar is equally important and so is learning about how languages, cultures and people basically work and interact at the core.

      Apart from that, noting down right ideas as they come is also very important. For example, the idea about the Wordsmith thing occurred to me yesterday when I was having a cup of tea. I noted it on time (before it could vanish into the depths of that dark matter called subconscious mind and become irretrievable again!), and made a note of that on my computer so that I can write it in today's proverbial pen.

      Even after having these basic tools and ingredients, you may not be able to write anything at all if you lack that focused energy or passion to write about a particular topic - be it a research paper, novel, story book or something else. You need to have that energy to write which I feel I'm lacking right now. I might be able to feel that energy some day as I continue with my battles, at least I hope so! Thanks for reading this and staying with me in these challenging times.

      7 votes