"Taps, taps, lights out. All hands turn into your bunks. Maintain silence about the decks. The smoking lamp is out in all designated spaces. Now taps."Navy shipboard announcement sounded each night at 2200 hours (10:00 pm)
Well, PhillyIMC had
a really good run from mid-2000 to mid-2014. But we've now been
threatened by lawyers to pay for an image that was taken from them
without their permission back in 2010. We're busy fighting this off
and are hopeful that we might get away with either a reduced payment,
or better yet, no payment at all.
Can PhillyIMC be
revived someday? Sure, but we're using Drupal 5 as our Content Management System (CMS) and
Drupal 7 is available. Certainly, our CMS can be upgraded, but we've
published almost 50,000 articles and I went through nearly 700 of
them. About one-quarter of those articles aren't worth keeping as
they no longer have photos or sound-files or movie files attached.
There's a larger proportion of good pieces later, but clearly,
there's a lot of stuff that we may as well delete before upgrading
the CMS.
Also, in order to
fend off the trolling lawyers, we need to make sure that all of the
images in use on the site are either photos that were taken by the
authors or are otherwise copyright-free images. I believe the site is
pretty much free of spam or unsolicited advertising, but I can't
guarantee that until a careful, detailed examination of all of the
articles is made. Going through the 700 articles, I found about 10
that were just copied and pasted from other sources and contained no
reference to their original source. Stories like these should all be
footnoted.
In other words,
there's lots and lots of work to be done before the site can be re-opened.
So yeah, we're announcing “Taps” on PhillyIMC. Will we ever
re-open it? Will we ever be able to sound “Reveille” on it?
That's an excellent question.