What does TLR mean?

The Lamp Room

Oh, I see, Although i think you have to pay Coppermine Photo Gallery though to keep the site running

GOL just needs a new owner to step in and give it some love...

In a way I'd love to step in as a co-owner or admin or something, & give the site a refresh
But I really don't know much about admin-ing a site like that, or what it would take to 'fix the issues' there. But I would assume the forum/gallery software keeps error-logs, and from there you could determine the promlem(s) & fix them.

Oh, I see, Although i think you have to pay Coppermine Photo Gallery though to keep the site running

Out of curiosity, I just looked it up and found

Coppermine is free software and is being released under the GNU GPL license.

Yeah, I think with some care and all the broken features fixed, GoL could be active again if there are enough users to sustain it. During it's height GoL used to have almost all the features of LG except for the ability to replace pictures. The other draw was that GoL was more laid back with the rules...it had a off topic section before LG got one for example.

The pictures weren't terrible per say but there were some types of uploads I personally didn't care for like TV show captures. A few is fine but currently 19/25 pictures on the last uploads are TV show captures which makes for not much stuff for me personally to look at and comment on. I think that stuff should be on its own site but I digress.

I think the biggest issue is the site tends to be broken for weeks to months at a time since the owner doesn't check it often.

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Coppermine is the software that generates the gallery. LG actually uses it too for the gallery. It's freely available and open source which makes it popular for sites like this as you only needed to pay for a host. The forum is run with a program called SMF - Simple Machines Forum which LG also runs their forum on. 

Now if someone were to start a new site, I'm not sure if Coppermine bridged with SMF would be my first choice. It's a bit outdated by modern standards in it's stock configuration and the Coppermine-SMF integration is a bit janky IMO. I believe there are more modern forum software solutions that also allow users to run their own galleries without installing something else. Sticking with Coppermine/SMF makes sense for LG as you don't have to figure out how to switch everything over but on a new site where you can start fresh I'd do some research into other options first.

As for my gallery, I'll probably reupload some of the more neat stuff that was never on LG here but most will probably stay on GoL. As it stands right now, a lot of my LG/GoL gallery is overlapping anyway. Back in the day I used to lean towards lamp collection photos on here and streetlight/HID stuff on GoL.

Yeah, i have WIX, Although it forces you to upgrade all the time to remove their adverts.
The site i created i might not share here, either.

My effort to contact Ian on both sites went unanswered

Oh well, at least you tried.

It might take months before it gets fixed, I think last year's error took around 4 months.

Be advised that the Gallery of Lights is down.

I see that
I wonder how long it'll be before its fixed (or for that matter if it even will be) ...

That is a very good question, xmaslightguy

I've not been on there for a long time, as it simply doesn't cover my area of interest. But I hope it can be saved.

Figured it would go down again. This time I fortunately backed up my images with the descriptions.

It always seems to glitch out at the same time every year, I remember it was having problems late summer last year too.

Saving the site probably isn't too hard, making it active again is the hard part. At least it going down means it's finally been put out of its misery.

Probably the Gallery of Lights engine needs to be rebooted