AutoGallery SQL - Software Overview



AutoGallery SQL v2.0.x -
Software Overview











Submitting Galleries
For a webmaster to submit a gallery, you need to direct
them to the post.cgi script. Any old link to that script will do. Once
they get there, they will fill out a form with all the information that is
needed to make a submission. When they press the submit button, their URLs
are verified (optional), reciprocal links are checked (optional), and
their submission is then added to the appropriate database.
E-mail Confirmation If you have the e-mail
confirmation option enabled, the webmaster's submission will be stored in
a temporary database. An e-mail will be sent to the e-mail address they
used with their submission. They will need to receive this e-mail and
visit the link that it contains. By visiting this link, it will verify
that they have a valid e-mail address. If you have the auto-approve option
enabled, their submission will be added to the current database and the
main TGP page upon visiting the confirmation link. If you are not using
the auto-approve option, the submission will be added to the queue where
you will be able to review the submission before displaying it on your
TGP. Auto-Approve If you have the auto-approve
option enabled, there will be no opportunity for you to review submissions
before they are added to your TGP. All submissions will be automatically
approved once they have been received, or after the confirmation link has
been visited if you are using the e-mail confirmation option. If you want
to be able to review all submissions before displaying them, you should
not use the auto-approve option. Maximum Posts Per Day
The maximum posts per day function uses the submitter's IP
address, website URL, and e-mail address to limit the number they can
submit. If the software matches on any of those, and the total number of
matches exceeds the number you have entered, the webmaster will not be
able to submit any more galleries until the date changes.
Permanent and Temporary Galleries When webmaster's
submit their galleries they will have the option to choose if their
gallery will be temporary or permanent. Permanent galleries are those
which they plan to leave on the server for a long period of time, and are
the only submissions that the software will move into the archives.
Temporary galleries are considered short term, and will not be placed in
the archives. Once their run on the main TGP page is up, they will be
removed from all databases.







Partners
The
software allows you to add partner accounts to the system. Partners are
webmasters who you trust to make good submissions without any type of
review or reciprocal link checking, but the software will still check for
banned HTML. You should only give partner accounts to webmasters that you
trust - you will not have any chance to review these submissions before
they appear on your TGP. Partner accounts can be added through the
administrative interface. Once a partner account is created, they will be
able to submit their galleries through the partner.cgi interface. You can
link to that page with any type of standard HTML link.







The Archives
The
software has an optional feature which will allow you to keep older
submissions, while not displaying them on your main TGP page. For each
category that you have an archive page will be created, and the page will
be named based on the category. The archive pages will only display
submissions once they have been rotated off your main TGP page. When you
first start running your TGP, the archives will not have any submissions
listed on them. The software will maintain the size of your archives, and
remove the oldest galleries first. Archive Page Naming
Each of your category archive pages will be named based on the
category and file extension entered in setup.cgi. The software will take
the category name, remove all non-alphanumeric characters, make all
letters lowercase, and attach the file extension. We'll give a few
examples so you can see how they will be named. In these examples, we will
assume 'html' was entered for the file extension in setup.cgi. Category HTML Name
-------- ---------
Internet internet.html
CGI Scripts cgiscripts.html
Unix/Linux unixlinux.html








Auto-approve & Auto-Update
With
the auto-approve option, you have the ability to set the minimum time
interval to elapse before your TGP pages automatically update. If you have
the auto-update interval set to 3600 this means that each time a
submission is made the software will check how long it has been since your
TGP pages were last updated. If it has been 3600 seconds (one hour) or
more, the software will automatically rebuild all of your TGP pages
for you. Note that this feature requires that you have a steady stream of
submissions. If you want the software to auto-update every hour, you will
need at least one submission per hour. It is recommended that you
have at least a 10 minute (600 seconds) auto-update interval to protect
your server from being overloaded. Rebuilding all of your pages can use
significant server resources for a short period of time. If for some
reason you had 100 submissions all come in at once, it could potentially
overload your server if it had to rebuild those pages many times.
If you want all submissions to be automatically approved, but you
want to manually rebuild your TGP pages each day at a specified time, set
the auto-update interval to -1 (negative one). This will tell the software
that it should never auto-update your TGP pages. You will need to remember
to login to the administrative interface every so often and run the
Rebuild All Pages function to make sure your pages are updated.







The Blacklists
The
blacklist is a list of items that you do not want to be posted to your
TGP. There is a blacklist for e-mail addresses, URLs, IP addresses, and
words. If you have found that someone is posting bogus galleries, you can
blacklist their URL, e-mail address, or IP address. If there are certain
words that you do not want to appear on your site, you can ban those from
the gallery descriptions. With the e-mail and URL bans, it is
possible to block an entire domain, or an exact URL or address. For
example, if you want to ban all people using Hotmail e-mail addresses from
posting, you should add 'hotmail.com' to the e-mail blacklist. If you only
want to ban John Doe, you would add '[e-mail]' to the
blacklist - this will allow others from hotmail.com to continue posting.








Cheater and Broken Link Reporting
You
can optionally put a small link next to each post which surfers will be
able to click on. This will take them to a page where they can report
cheaters or dead links. All reports are stored in a database which can be
viewed from admin.cgi. You will need to decide if the surfer has correctly
identified a bad site or not, and you can then process that cheat. If you
select the 'Do Nothing' option, the cheat report will be removed from the
database and the post will remain. If you choose to 'Delete & Ban',
the selected post will be deleted and the domain name and e-mail address
from which it was posted will be added to the ban lists; the cheat report
will be removed at the same time. If you choose to 'Delete Only' the
selected post will be deleted, but nothing will be blacklisted.







Number of Submissions to Display
The
software offers three different methods to determine the number of
submissions that should be displayed on your main page. The first,
and most simple, is the Most Recent Posts option. With this, the software
will simply display the x most recent submissions in the database on your
main TGP page, where x is the number you entered in the setup.cgi
interface. If you entered say 100 for that value, the software will show
at most 100 submissions on your TGP page. Once that number has been
reached, the oldest submissions will be moved into the archives if you
have them enabled. The second option is to display the Most Recent
Posts Per Category. With this option, the number of galleries displayed on
your main TGP page will depend on how many categories you have. If you
have 10 categories and tell the software to display the 15 most recent
posts per category, you will have at most 150 galleries on your main page.
Once a category has more than 15 submissions, the oldest in that category
will be moved into the archives. The final option is to display
the Most Recent Days Worth of Posts. With this option, the number of
galleries displayed on your main TGP page will be controlled by the
template you use for that page. More details on this option will be coming
soon.