Hi,

as you can see from the image above, some languages are lagging behind a little. Would you like to help AstroBin by contributing to the translation to your native language? It's easy!

Go to the localization server, and create an account. Then click on your language, then a project, and start translating!

Remember to click on the Submit button instead of the Suggest button, so your translation won't need approval from another translator.

And if you have any questions or trouble, just let us know!

Thank you!

Tags : help-request

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Last week I have launched AstroBin Questions, a community driven, highly interactive, wiki-capable website that you moderate, thanks to a system based on reputation points.

I've just written down a meta questions that explains how reputation and votes work, what they are and how they should be used. You can read it on AstroBin Questions, or here below. And by the way, if you are still wondering what AstroBin Question is, and why it's so important for the astrophotography community, read this: What is AstroBin Questions?

Introduction

This website works a lot differently than a forum. A good explanation about how this is not a forum can be found in the first meta-question asked.

This meta-question talks about reputation and voting.

One key reason why this website was made, was to provide the astrophotography community with a way to get correct answers to question, not just any answer.

Reputation and votes are the way in which the community moderates itself, and makes sure the best answer is on top.

What is the proper way to vote?

Every question, and every answer, can be voted up or down.

You should vote up if:

• You think the question is interesting
• You think the answer is correct or informative

You should vote a question down if:

• You think the question is off-topic, or too poorly worded to be comprehensible
• You think the question doesn't bring any value to the community, for instance because an answer could have easily been found on Wikipedia
• You think the question has already be asked in the past (in this case, please also leave a comment with the link to the old question)

You should vote an answer down if:

• The answer is objectively incorrect
• The answer is not substantial enough to actually answer the question
• The answer is not really an answer, but it should have been posted as a comment or as a new question (e.g. follow-up questions)

What's the role of reputation?

Reputation points are a way to express how reputable a person is in the community. Reputation can be earned and lost, primarily because of votes received.

When a person has a high reputation, people will know that they can trust their answers.

These are the primary reputation gain and loss rules, but bear in mind that the numbers might change in the future, if the community becomes larger:

• Maximum daily reputation gain per user: 200
• Gain for receiving an upvote: 10
• Gain for the author of accepted answer: 15
• Gain for accepting best answer: 2
• Gain for post owner on canceled downvote: 2
• Gain for voter on canceling downvote: 1
• Loss for voter for canceling of answer acceptance: -2
• Loss for author whose answer was "un-accepted": -5
• Loss for giving a downvote: -2
• Loss for owner of post that was flagged offensive: -2
• Loss for owner of post that was downvoted: -10
• Loss for owner of post that was flagged 3 times per same revision: -30
• Loss for owner of post that was flagged 5 times per same revision: -100
• Loss for post owner when upvote is canceled: -10

As you can see, users are rewarded reputation for actively helping to shape the community. If you accept an answer, for instance, you are rewarded 2 reputation points. Also, notice how downvoting will cost you reputation: this is because downvoting should not be done lightly, but in the spirit of bettering the community when this is necessary.

What can I do with my reputation?

Besides gaining respect in the community, reputation allows you certain privileges. These are the reputation points you need to perform certain actions (remember that these numbers too might change in the future, as the community grows):

• Upvote: 5
• Downvote: 50
• Answer own question immediately: 5
• Accept own answer: 20
• Accept any answer: 500
• Flag offensive: 5
• Leave comments: 10
• Delete comments posted by others: 200
• Delete questions and answers posted by others: 500
• Upload files: 10
• Insert clickable links: 1
• Insert link suggestions as plain text: 1
• Close own questions: 25
• Retag questions posted by other people: 50
• Reopen own questions: 50
• Edit community wiki posts: 75
• Edit posts authored by other people: 200
• View offensive flags: 200
• Close questions asked by others: 200
• Lock posts: 400

As you can see, after 200 reputation points, things start to get serious and you are allowed lots of moderation tasks. This is all in the best interest of the community, so we can have a website that has good, legitimate and correct content!

What does it mean to "flag offensive"?

Finally, you have the option of flagging posts (both questions and answers) as offensive. This should be used if the post contains spam, vulgarity or is actually offending to the community for other reasons.

Tags : site-news

Discussions : 1 comment

I've just realized that some code I had introduced on October 26th caused a bug and some images would hang for a long time (or forever) as "still processing."

The bug has now been solved, but would you care to please let me know if you were affected?

Thanks and sorry about the incovenience!

Tags : service-communications

Discussions : 3 comments

As most of you will have noticed, AstroBin has just launched a sister site, called AstroBin Questions.

AstroBin Questions is a Questions & Answers site focused on the quality of the content. The allowed subjects of discussion are Astrophotography and Astronomy.

AstroBin Questions was created because, as of today, the most common form in which astronomy communities exist is that of the forum. A 20+ years old concept, that doesn't scale well with massive amount of information, does a terrible job at organizing such information (in fact it barely tries), and presents a number of flaws.

AstroBin Questions address the problems forums have, and is a community driven, highly interactive, wiki-capable website that you moderate, thanks to a system based on karma points. If you haven't already, checkout the introductory page here: http://www.astrobin.com/help/questions/

In addition to this, I'd like to tell you that your image pages now have a large button: Request critique. Clicking this button will bring you to AstroBin Questions's "Ask a question" page. The page will be pre-filled with information about the image for which you clicked on Request critique.

This way, you can ask the community specific questions you may have about how to improve your acquisition or processing technique, in relation to that particular image.

Check out the help and faq pages on AstroBin Questions and join today!

Tags : announcements

Discussions : No comments yet. Be first to comment!

A few months ago, there was a discussion on CloudyNights concerning the rating system on AstroBin. Some opinions were expressed and some suggestions were made.

Many of you have already noticed that the meaning of the 5 stars is as follows:

1. It's a start, but it needs better data.
2. It looks good, but it needs better processing.
3. Good data, good processing.
4. Great result!
5. Top quality!

The problem

The solution

From today, all ratings on AstroBin have been migrated to a new system, called AstroBin index. Calculating the index works in two phases:

1. An average vote is calculated using a sigma-rejection algorithm. Credit: Giovanni Benintende.
2. The average vote is fed to an function of the number of votes received, and interpolated hyperbolically. Credit: Alberto Mardegan.

Phase #1 ensures that if an image has been voted 5-star many times, a spurious 1-star vote will be ignored.

Phase #2 ensures that an image voted with a single 5-star vote will not have a better rating than an image that was voted with one hundred 5-star and one 4-star just because 5 > 4.9999999...

Conclusion

This seems to yield much fairer results, especially with images with lots of votes. Of course I should encourage you to comment on images if you vote 1-star or 2-star, because this would like to be a constructive community.

Now go have a look at the Big Wall sorted by rating for some really amazing images, and vote on!

PS: I've needed to add a new FAQ entry to explain the AstroBin index, so that needs to be translated to all languages! It's only a couple of sentences, want to help? http://translate.astrobin.com/

Tags : site-news

Discussions : 6 comments

Thanks to the great work of Konstantinos Stavropoulos, now AstroBin is also available in Greek!

A big THANK YOU to him and a great welcome to all the new users from Greece.

Tags : site-news

Discussions : 4 comments

While I work on new features on a different, unstable branch, I've made some small additions and fixes to the master and stable branch of AstroBin's code, and I tagged version 1.8.1.

Here's what's new:

• A rendering problem with IE >= 9 was fixed;
• The Stats page was made faster;
• You can now search images by the size of the pixels of the imaging camera;
• Monochromatic PNG images with an alpha channel now work;
• astrobin.com, astrob.in and www.astrob.in all redirect to www.astrobin.com, so there isn't a session mismatch anymore, and you will always be logged in if you don't log out explicitly;
• Menu icons were refreshed: they are larger and there's more of them;
• Image revisions now are labeled "B", "C", "D", and so on;
• When sharing an image revision with a thumbnail, the thumbnail now is the image revision thumbnail, and not the original one;
• All thumbnails across the site are updated to the "Final" revision of their image.

Further more, Catalan and Slovak language are currently under translation!

AstroBin is growing: almost 2000 users, and over 1100 have uploaded images; over 12000 public images and we broke the wall of 20000 integration hours! Way to go!

This was only a minor update but I still have lots of features planned, so stay tuned!

Tags : site-news

Discussions : 1 comment

Hi all,

because of a bug in AstroBin's code, owners of the Lacerta MGEN autoguider camera will found that the camera has disappeared from their profiles and images.

This happened because a user created a "Lacerta MGEN" as a Telescope, instead of a Camera, and the automated merging that followed couldn't find the correct item, so things were removed but not added back.

Obviously I have now fixed the code so this shouldn't happen again.

I'm really sorry about the inconvenience!

Salvatore.

Tags : announcements

Discussions : 1 comment

Hi all.

Our good friend Eric has not only helped with the French translation, but has gone ahead and created the first working project that uses AstroBin's API!

If you have a WordPress blog, you can now use Eric's widget to display your recent AstroBin uploads. Fetch it while it's hot:

http://ecb-astro.net/depot/

I'd like to thank Eric very much and invite you to try his widget!

Tags : site-news

Discussions : 2 comments

Hello,

If you have done anything on AstroBin between 2012-06-05 10:21 GMT and 2012-06-05 11:46 GMT, unfortunately that activity has been lost due to a technical problem.

Any images you have uploaded, voted, commented, or any other activity during that hour and twenty-five minutes have vanished.

Luckily the damaged was contained very well, so the impact was minimal.

My apologies to everybody who was affected,

Salvatore.

Tags : announcements

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