I do hope that I'm not -too- DQN for posting this here, but I feel it's a good board for this communities' general organization. This is a post to gauge how interested everyone is in something like this.
As we all know, archiving images is something the danbooru software does very well, though it needs a little bit of work. The concept that danbooru (the site, not the software) itself brought us was great, but also too general, the way I see it. Eventually, thanks to not having any particular focus, the site became a huge pool of... everything (/b/?), with too much demand/stress, and too little moderation (well, it was ganything goesh). Despite the fact you could exclude certain tags from any search, after awhile, things began blending together and tags became a little too wide.
Setting up an imageboard using the software seems to work better for moe.imouto.org, which has at least some idea of the content they want – gqualityh images with a strict no-ero policy and a heavy focus on high resolution pictures. moe.imouto.org does what it does pretty well.
And finally, what I'm looking at is refining the content of an archive-style imageboard even further, to specific series/fetishes/persona/whatever, much like the focused boards on any *chan style site you see today.
This would require improving on the danbooru software in a number of ways, and documenting the installation and usability better (or at all...). My guess is that the different bugs, poor documentation, and difficulty to install, were some of the reasons danbooru didn't catch on so much. Sagubooru is already working on their own improvements and some are nice, but to be completely honest I'd rather head in a different direction.
More than that, this would require interest in putting this software to good use to preserve art much like danbooru did. It'd have to be a community effort, and organized well – there's no reason to have two different danbooru dedicated to touhou, really. So long as the tagging doesn't go batshit.
Then maybe something of an overchan could appear and magically link together all the different installs. For the record, http://box.shishnet.org/ lists sites running danbooru-style software at the moment. http://mikomiko.org, http://hinamizawa.org/index (wallpapers), and http://e621.net/post/list (furries), have a good idea of what I'm looking to accomplish.
What I know want to know is if this seems to anyone, worth it. Improving the software would take a bit of effort, and time. I just think that making focused archives that preserve images could, in the long run, really be useful and nice to have around... without eventually turning into huge, unmanageable, cesspools.
The big draw danbooru had was that it did have everything, though. Remove that, and you remove most users, and thus you never get any decent amount of images.
PS: Sagubooru is a horrible, horrible joke. It is probably the single most misdesigned web app I have ever laid eyes on.
But wasn't Danbooru's problem that it became so popular that it became too costly to run? I think some focus is good, and if the subject is popular enough you'll get a decent amount of contributions. A super niche also has its advantages in that the admin alone could handle almost everything. Personally I wish somebody would set up an oekaki archive. It would probably contain stuff SQL enough to make it popular.
BTW Danbooru did catch on, there are many more archives than those listed at Boxshishnet.
>>2
Well, honestly, I don't think there's a problem if there aren't a large number of contributors. As long as people know the sites exist, and there are a few dedicated people that already run around all the different imageboards / random art sites for a specific thing they really like anyway, it'd really be more archiving. If the danbooru discussion system was worked on a bit (or has it been?) it could become more like a regular board for the really, really popular stuff, though... maybe.
Not sure how much I like that, though.
In the end, perhaps an aim could be just using danbooru as an image gallery page. But when you're that focused already, is tagged searching really all that useful?
And yeah, sagubooru is absolutely horrible.
>>4
A static image archive is not a very discussion friendly setup.
This is late, but the Overbooru tries to accomplish this
http://pinochan.net/overbooru/
This is late, but the Overbooru tries to accomplish this
http://pinochan.net/overbooru/