# Gallery > Finished Maps >  Finished Maps Thumbs

## Redrobes

So if you have found the site slow tonight - sorry, my fault.

Still, you can get me back and hose my ISP now. Hope a CL can sticky this and ill edit this text out and make it all nice shortly when were all fixed up.

For now theres some tedious admin to do. The indexer took all the pages and made a list. Then it sorted them and appended a number to the end for each person to keep them separate. Then I grabbed the last image from each of the threads and thumbed them. Some of them didn't work right and some don't have the image as an attachment. Some also have posts after the proper image so its not the correct one. So we could do with a list of items that are wrong. If some CLs could take those posts and look at those threads by clicking on the name link in the thumbs page and add a usual WIP tag to those posts. Once done then edit that notification post and put a DONE in there. Once the notification posts go to all done then ill run it again and we keep going like that till its all fixed up.

Right - lets cane the servers with this...

Finished Map Thumbnails
A-C D-F G-I J-L M-O P-R S-U V-X Y-Z

Can I also add that the maps in this list are by default copyright but are probably available for use. But please check the thread to see the usage terms for them which is often in the sig of the author. From the authors, please comment on the usability of the images in the threads.

----------


## Redrobes

Redrobes_1 - DONE.

(I was able to do this one myself. Already found some maps I lost the location of... this is going to be useful when its done.)

----------


## RobA

Remind me not to hit that link with my phone...again...

-Rob A>

(Nice job btw)

----------


## Steel General

Great job RedRobes, I'll have to go in and edit some of my posts to make sure the map is the first image. Don't think anyone will be impressed by the ICE Contest Entry form  :Smile: 


EDIT: The thread has been 'Sticky-ed'

----------


## Fabrice

Great idea to organise this in thumbnails.

I noticed that the script picked up the wrong picture for "Fabrice1".

It is not that surprising because I was always attaching my updates in the first post, to spare the visitors from going through the whole thread to get to the final version. As a consequence the script picked up an illustration meant to support a side discussion that was going on at the time.

What would be your recommendation to fix this? Should I upload the picture again in the last post of the thread?

----------


## bartmoss

Great gallery. Some of the images didn't load for me, this may be a problem on my end (proxy or browser) because there's just so many of them.

----------


## Redrobes

@Fabrice - thanks for checking, we need to know which ones are not right. Don't do anything - we need a CL to fix up a WIP tag - see O/P.

@bartmoss - some dont have images yet. See O/P.

----------


## Valarian

Thanks Redrobes, at last a convenient tool for spreading rep

----------


## joão paulo

It is a beautiful collection, that is good in the eyes.
Thanks man!

----------


## Hoel

Hey nice!
I'll go and look over my entries in the gallery and bring the ones that are posted in other forums.

----------


## jfrazierjr

> Great idea to organise this in thumbnails.
> 
> I noticed that the script picked up the wrong picture for "Fabrice1".
> 
> It is not that surprising because I was always attaching my updates in the first post, to spare the visitors from going through the whole thread to get to the final version. As a consequence the script picked up an illustration meant to support a side discussion that was going on at the time.
> 
> What would be your recommendation to fix this? Should I upload the picture again in the last post of the thread?



Read the Finished Map forum rules sticky.  Finished maps should be be just that, finished.   Any updates should be back to the original image in the first post. 


Redrobes, can you modify your script to grab the first image instead of the last one found so that your script conforms to the rules of this forum?

----------


## Steel General

Another thing I just noticed is that Steel_General_1 and Steel_General_11 pull the same image even though they are different threads.

----------


## Redrobes

> Redrobes, can you modify your script to grab the first image instead of the last one found so that your script conforms to the rules of this forum?


I can try that later today. I think it would help. It ought to be a bit quicker to get all the images since I have many of them already.

----------


## Redrobes

Ok thats done now. Its definitely better. Theres still a lot of threads where the images were hosted on different sites and some where its picked up something else in that case and missing the real map. Theres about 4 instances where the script failed so its got an image marker but no image for it. Ill have to fix that up.

It can still take a wip tag to override the first image so if its not the first image thats required or we could post a version of the map as an on site attachment instead of the offsite one then we could put a wip tag in on that post to fix the thumb up for it.

Its only about 20% wrong now.

----------


## torstan

I have to say that my favourite is Pyrandon_5  :Smile: 

That's quite a gallery of images there. Great work RR.

----------


## Redrobes

Ah yes thats when we gave The Cartographist the monikor "Tim the Enchanter" for some reason I forgot. I miss ole Pyrandon so I mailed him a few weeks back and he still checks in occasionally. If you want to see some great art look up the original tile mosaic he did.

Edit -- hopefully this post wont make sense in the future cos thats one we should fix up !

----------


## cerebreturns

i'm not one for using overland maps in any of the games i run, but these are realy impressive pieces of work, they make me want to think of a reason to use them!

----------


## jfrazierjr

> Can I also add that the maps in this list are by default copyright but are probably available for use. But please check the thread to see the usage terms for them which is often in the sig of the author. From the authors, please comment on the usability of the images in the threads.



Yes, please do as soon as possible, both in this thread and in the linked page hosted on your site.   I would rather it be rather obnoxious that understated.

----------


## Clercon

Geat initiative. It's really fun to look at all these great maps. Found one or two I hadn't seen before.

----------


## fabio0069

Sweet maps! Some great inspiration right there  :Wink:

----------


## Redrobes

Run it a second time and its filled in all the missing ones it failed to get first time around. There are some with gaps because theres no proper attachment and three now with an image marker but no image. Those are PDF links - doh ! So ill have to check for that and put up a generic PDF image instead for those. Might have to look for zips too. Anyway - if any CL feels like making an image from whatever they have posted and uploading them for any of the missing ones then that would get caught by it next time I believe.

Edit -- hah I have just realized its putting in extra entries for me because of this thread. Hmmm, must add something to check the title for a 'sticky' and ignore... Bugs are always for the things you never think of in a million years. Someone once said something like - however weird you can dream it up reality will go further. I heard another paraphrase similar to that with real user interaction of any program you write too. They _will_ break it in ways you would not possibly have imagined.

----------


## Steel General

I think it's doing the same for Arcana

----------


## Redrobes

Yeah been looking at the code. It gets the forum and lists all the entries and works out how many pages there are. Then it gets all in page1 then all in page 2 etc and builds up all the threads. Well the stickies are always there for any page number so its adding them in several times depending on how many pages there are. So I have adjusted the script to ignore all stickies since they are unlikely to be maps. I'll run it again in a mo but ill fix up the PDF image first.

----------


## Nomadic

It isn't showing the latest version for this map. Do I just add a ###WIP### tag to it or what?

----------


## Redrobes

You need to add the map as a full attachment not a link to another site. It has to display as an attachment image. And if the proper image is not the first image then you need to put:

### Latest WIP ###

at the end of the text bit of your post so that the attached image is just under it.

Oh and then you have to wait until I run the script again which takes a while so I dont do it all that often. I think in your case people will get the general idea from the first thumb and click in and see the latest image if they want it. It would be nice to fix up those thumbs that are completely wrong or missing however but thats a CL job cos I cant edit all the threads.

----------


## Nomadic

Ok it's been updated (and I didn't mean the link picture I meant the latest picture on the thread).

----------


## Korash

just had a look through and noticed that mine (Teston) is not on the list. just letting you know.

----------


## Redrobes

Ok ill run it again shortly. It canes the site a bit cos it has to fetch all the threads to see if they have changed and all the new images. When I run the challenge thumbs ill do a complete index rebuild too.

----------


## RobA

Here is a replacement image to throw in for the "No Image" placeholder, using the site font, colour, and symbol.

-Rob A>

----------


## Steel General

That's fantastic RobA!

----------


## Redrobes

Thats great Rob and I have changed it over. There are a few missing like loogie where he has done a zip or pdf. The script is supposed to be able to detect this and it used to work but for some reason its not at mo. Are you able to do a similar image for "Zip or PDF" or something like that and then ill work on getting it to display that properly too. The No Image has no link the Zip one is supposed to link to the file which downloads it but I could abandon that and go with the No Image for PDFs too.

----------


## RobA

How are these?

-Rob A>

----------


## Redrobes

They look great Rob but can I ask another small favor ?? When I get the attachment I run it into imagemagick and it says that it fails to load the image so at that point all I know is that its an attachment that is not an image. I dont know whether its a zip or a PDF specifically, only that it must be either a zip or PDF. So is it possible to do one image with a "Zip or PDF" as the text ? I will look into fixing up the script to put up the image when it encounters this scenario cos at present it tries to put up a thumbnail which does not exist. It used to work so it cant be far out. Thanks.

EDIT -- I guess looking at your image it could be a Doc too so something like "PDF/ZIP/Doc" maybe ? Or just "Other" or leave out the text ? I dunno but I have to go with "the unknown but existing attachment" image.

----------


## RobA

Like "Attached File"?

-Rob A>

----------


## Redrobes

Yeah that would be perfect.

----------


## sephirith

Thank you a LOT for this,

I hope to find someone to develop a map for my RPG  :Smile:

----------


## töff

LOL. Neither of the 2 images with my name on them are from my 3 finished maps (in my sig).  :Smile: 

Attached, thumbs ... am I doing this right?

----------


## Steel General

The script may not have been run recently.

----------


## töff

It's more than a simple script, right? Isn't there "tedious admin" to do? or was that just to get it established.

----------


## Robbie

Redrobes so graciously made it quite easy to run...its a matter of "click here"

----------


## Redrobes

Most of the thumbs are pretty easy but the finished and choice ones are a bit more involved as it has to run the scrape of scrapes to see what threads are listed in order to build a list to check for images. So I still do these semi-manually. I last ran it on 14th of July so dont know why its not picked them up. Also don't know why on transit map its picked up wrong image. If the first image attached is not the one you want you need a latest wip tag like in the challenges. I'll run the indexer again to get the latest set of threads and then run the image scraper to get them again. It takes quite a while tho. The finished maps thumbs are pretty extensive. If it gets much bigger we might have to do it A-E F-L M-S T-Z or something like that. Gimme an hour...

----------


## Steffworthington

Hi guys, my first post and a map from my forthcoming RPG product. It's the city of Sinabal in the region of Paleador.

----------


## Redrobes

> Hi guys, my first post and a map from my forthcoming RPG product. It's the city of Sinabal in the region of Paleador.
> http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_-3_wb273Qu...s1600-h/35.jpg
> 
> I tried to link to the pic but it wouldnt work... maybe it doesnt like blogspot.


Hi Steff, Nice pic and worthy of a place in the finished maps section ! But this isnt really the place as this is the finished thumbnails thread. What you need to do is start a new thread in the finished map topic and add your pic. You can do that by using the manage attachments button and uploading your map. It will then create a thumbnail in that thread and it will link to the full size image. Now and again I run a script over all the threads in the finished maps topic and grab all the top pics and make the big page of all thumbs. Its a bit out of date at mo but it will get it eventually. Oh and welcome, you can post an intro thread as well  :Smile:

----------


## Steffworthington

Cheers for the heads up! :Smile:

----------


## eabrek23

How come none of my maps are in the thumbs? Or have just not run the thingymajiggy lately?

----------


## Redrobes

Its been running all eve so they should be up there now.

Its getting to be an awfully big page now...

----------


## eabrek23

Heh, I posted my second map today, but it appears I did not before the thing finished, so now only my first is there. Darn.

----------


## Gandwarf

In time your second map is going to show up there also, don't worry...

----------


## Redrobes

Yeah the indexes were updated at about 4pm GMT so you missed out there. As Gandwarf says, they will get in there in time. It takes an hour or so to run it so I do it now and again to get them up to date.

----------


## Steel General

@RedRobes - Would it maybe be better to break it up into smaller chunks and have separate links; A-I, J-R, S-Z

----------


## Redrobes

Yeah I was saying such a thing in #41. Its just too big now aint it. I have image caching on in my browser and yet it does not cache the images properly any more. I think its burnt through the 10Mb or whatever it has for a cache and is cycling through them now. That's not good for site bandwidth as well. I could make the images smaller if that would be better. I might speak with Arcana / CLs on this issue too and see what we come up with.

----------


## Redrobes

Check out the new listings. Any probs gimme a post !

----------


## Ramah

All works fine for me. Great stuff.  :Smile: 

I hope this makes it easier for you to update them now. Although I would guess you need to run it nine times now instead of one?

----------


## Steel General

Works great!

----------


## Gidde

Works great, but I think there's a typo on this page: http://www.cartographersguild.com/ut...ishedMaps3.htm

The page title says Finished Maq WIP ...

Thanks for all the hard work you put into these, Redrobes  :Smile:

----------


## Redrobes

Thanks guys.

Firstly its about as easy as always to update it. From my recent OS reinstall I didnt have my perl magick set up right so that was the pain yesterday but its alright now. Theres a windows 2003 / XPx64 based install bug in it.

It still takes ages. I first run the index scripter which looks at all the thread topics on the whole site which is pretty slow then it builds up the list of finished map threads to check. Then it has to fetch each of those looking for the image to use then in the new cases it has to download all the new images and then builds the finished maps page. Now I run a splitter on that which chops it into 9 or so pages which takes about a second. Its still the fetching bit thats slow so I do it now and again.

The splitter copies the header from the all thumbs page so that typo is on all of the pages. I'll fix that in a mo and it will propagate on to the site next run. But thanks for pointing it out.

If your new to these thumbs then also check out the other indexes in my sig as they are now up to date as of yesterday too. If you think I need more topics in the keyword index then let me know. They are generally terrain / map types and popular software packages used. You can use the forum keywords as well to search on stuff but mine is done by word in title.

EDIT - oh yeah about the cache thing. I discovered that I turned the cache off so that if the image changes then you dont have to flush the cache. That was for the compo entries but I think in the finished and choice maps case it ought to be cached I think.

----------


## Diamond

Are you still running the thingamajig for thumbs?  Just wondering since only one of my finished maps shows up...

----------


## Ascension

I think Redrobes has to do it himself.  I tried to figure out how to update it but couldn't.

----------


## Redrobes

Yeah I drive it but the finished thumbs I have to run manually. It takes ages as it has to run through all of the threads indexing them then runs through all the finished threads fetching all the entries and looking to see whether they have changed. All the new ones get updated. I run it every couple of months so it will get indexed in time. We have done some of the scripting on the server side but the finished maps is too big to let it do it. The server is one of the ISPs not a personal PC. We cant get it tied up for ages whilst it does our stuff.

----------


## Diamond

Gotcha.  I was just wondering; no biggie.

----------


## Aerius

Great idea! perfect for inspiration and reference.

----------


## Varshanka

for some reason i can't view the pics/maps on the first post of this thread

----------


## Redrobes

I just checked and its ok for me.

I should run the script again as its been a while so it might be a bit out of date but the A-Z links should point to pages of maps thumbs. You could try flushing your cache. With firefox try an F5 or a ctrl F5. Or press ctrl + alt + SHIFT and it will pop up the delete cached bits.

----------


## Varshanka

sorry, i should clarify. i can click the letters and get the pics, but many of the pics won't enlarge. 


This is what i get (and yes i'm logged in) :

You are not logged in or you do not have permission to access this page. This could be due to one of several reasons:
You are not logged in. Fill in the form at the bottom of this page and try again. 
You may not have sufficient privileges to access this page. Are you trying to edit someone else's post, access administrative features or some other privileged system? 
If you are trying to post, the administrator may have disabled your account, or it may be awaiting activation. 
The administrator may have required you to register before you can view this page.

----------


## Redrobes

Ok, well I clicked on the A's and went through the whole first screen page full from Agent Orange 1 to Aidy Baby and they all came up. If you can see these but have others that you cant then can you name the maps and ill try those too.

It does really sound like a cookie problem tho. Can you flush your cookies, quit the browser and start it again and log back in. I know you need to have made 5 posts before you get PM access and listed on the members board. I don't know if somehow the finished maps are limited to <5 post members but I didn't think that was the case. I would agree that guests would be able to see the thumbs but not the main maps tho. It sounds like your being seen as a guest by the system.

----------


## Varshanka

to clarify, when i click on some of the pics such as Agent Orange, i get the message:

vBulletin Message

You are not logged in or you do not have permission to access this page. This could be due to one of several reasons:
You are not logged in. Fill in the form at the bottom of this page and try again. 
You may not have sufficient privileges to access this page. Are you trying to edit someone else's post, access administrative features or some other privileged system? 
If you are trying to post, the administrator may have disabled your account, or it may be awaiting activation. 
The administrator may have required you to register before you can view this page.

----------


## Redrobes

Hmm ok well I understand what your seeing just not why its happening. I would post two more posts to make it to 5 just in case that is the reason and noone has ever mentioned it. At 5 you get extra PM abilities etc but I really think its a browser / cookie issue. If I logged out then I would expect to see that same thing but as a member you should get those images.

----------


## silvercity

who did Naeddyr 1 and 2?...

those are very intriguing to me....

sorry i'm new to this site...and i just saw the pictures...no owner  :Frown:

----------


## Steel General

> who did Naeddyr 1 and 2?...
> those are very intriguing to me....
> sorry i'm new to this site...and i just saw the pictures...no owner


Naeddyr is the alias of the member who submitted those. Once you have 5 posts, you could try sending them a PM.

----------


## tilt

I just checked the finished maps - and to my horror - my maps aren't there  :Wink:   ... so I'm guesing long time no update... and while we are on update - wouldn't it be cool if we could sort the finished maps in World/Regional/City/Dungeon/Battle/Board groups? That would make it easier to find the type of map you're looking for  :Smile:

----------


## Redrobes

Yeah, long time no update. The issues are a) it takes a long time to do the indexing, fetching and checking and since the new host move the site is a bit more flakey than it used to be so if it bails out on getting the page or image then it would likely corrupt the thumb of it and b) more importantly, since the move I have lost my FTP access to the site which arcana gave me so I cant upload all the resulting thumb pics even if it did get them all. So the finished and choice thumbs are not being updated until those two can be resolved.

In terms of sorting by type - absolutely ! Id like that too. But I don't know how to classify them. Id need something on the page to tell me what group they are in. But yeah, in principle it could be done.

----------


## tilt

yep.. aware of that - maybe one could make either sub-forums or just make sure everybody followed a naming convention, for instance "Region map - Mountain Realms" - I'm guessing the sub-forums would be easier. I would be glad to help moving or registering all the maps and assigning them to a sub-forum - no prob.

It would of course be cool if the thumbs were added automatically when a thread was created in the finished map sections... so you didn't have to do i manually - that would of course be possible to programme, but way out of my abilities..   :Smile:

----------


## Redrobes

Ok updated today which is 5/7/2010.

----------


## tilt

yeah.. I'm in the finished maps section  :Wink:    good job Redrobes  :Smile:

----------


## Ascension

How great is it to walk through these finished maps?!  Brings back some great memories and got to see some surprises that I hadn't seen before.

----------


## Legion of Super Heroes

Is there a way to seek out maps created for specific things, such as for Space/futuristic maps or those for a particular D&D world that people have done? Also how do we tell what program they used to make the map?

----------


## tilt

try using the search function to search for specific stuff, if people tagged their maps you might find what you need. Concerning what programs used you have to read the thread for the map (or the WIP thread for the same map) and hope its mentioned there - or simply ask the cartographer  :Smile: 
We hope to get the finished maps more organized with time, but we both need the right software and a lot of sorting work to get there.  :Smile:

----------


## Redrobes

It is true that our finished maps are sorted by person instead of a number of more useful things. We could do this if we had some more tags against all of the finished maps but we dont so an automated script has no idea about what the map is. I also run a number of other scripts for the site one of which is the keyword index which you can see in my sig or its on the top menus somewhere - extra links - or similar. Anyway that sorts the threads of the whole guild looking for keywords like scifi or space or by software used. The keyword must be in the title however so theres loads of threads missing from it. Still, thats a good place to start. There is also the tagging mechanism so you can look for specific tags using the advanced search features. I think we all agree tho that having better categorizing of the finished maps would be a good idea.

----------


## sus323

Sadly, the map links all appear to lead to dead ends. Did I just happen to pick the dead ones or do any lead to the actual maps?

----------


## nolgroth

> Sadly, the map links all appear to lead to dead ends. Did I just happen to pick the dead ones or do any lead to the actual maps?


Just stumbled upon this too. However, when I looked at the Choice thread there was an instructionto remove the "forum." from the beginning of the URL. I tried it and I am able to see the maps.

Damn fine maps in this collection too.

----------


## RobA

I've added a more dynamic version of this page:

Cartographers' Guild - Finished Maps Thumbnails - A

and one filtered to industry professional members' maps:

Cartographers' Guild - Industry Professional Finished Maps Thumbnails - A

These use a lazy-loader javascript so the thumbnails are only loaded when the window is scrolled... Not sure how this will impact on the server load - so we'll try it a while and if it causes issues, block it.

(You must be a guild member, not a guest, to access these pages)

-Rob A>

----------


## vorropohaiah

I've noticed this before - some members are listed as professionals, while most others are just listed by amount of Rep they have. how do industry professionals get that tag (i'm guessing the tag also determines in which of the 2 above links their galleries will appear in?

----------


## RobA

> I've noticed this before - some members are listed as professionals, while most others are just listed by amount of Rep they have. how do industry professionals get that tag (i'm guessing the tag also determines in which of the 2 above links their galleries will appear in?


Community leaders can place individuals in the Industry Professional group by request.  We will verify that the person is an individual is involved in a commercial manner, first.

All members show up in the first link, including IPs.

-Rob A>

----------


## Chashio

Is there any possibility in future of having a sorting system based on the submission date of the finished post or is that already a reality somewhere?

----------


## RobA

> Is there any possibility in future of having a sorting system based on the submission date of the finished post or is that already a reality somewhere?


It's possible, I'd just have to code it! 

-RobA>

----------


## snowlorenzo

Love the thumbnails, but when i click to see a larger pic i get an error message...  how can i get in touch to some of the authors?

----------


## RobA

> Love the thumbnails, but when i click to see a larger pic i get an error message...  how can i get in touch to some of the authors?


What is the error message?

-RobA>

----------


## 006

> I've noticed this before - some members are listed as professionals, while most others are just listed by amount of Rep they have. how do industry professionals get that tag (i'm guessing the tag also determines in which of the 2 above links their galleries will appear in?


I was also wondering this, thanks for the response RobA

----------


## Heru-Zame

Very good maps an draws...

----------


## mr.Rope

> What is the error message?


If it is the same one I'm seeing right now, then it is this:




> Site Temporarily Unavailable
> 
> We apologize for the inconvenience. Please contact the webmaster/ tech support immediately to have them rectify this.
> 
> error id: "bad_httpd_conf"


Seems like the URLs are just a bit amiss there. Clicking on a thumbnail directs you to _http://forum.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=..._ though it should probably be _http://cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=..._ without the extra _forum_ part in the beginning.

----------


## RobA

> If it is the same one I'm seeing right now, then it is this:
> 
> 
> 
> Seems like the URLs are just a bit amiss there. Clicking on a thumbnail directs you to _http://forum.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=..._ though it should probably be _http://cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=..._ without the extra _forum_ part in the beginning.


I don't get that - it directs to www, not forum for me.  What is your browser/OS?

-Rob A>

----------


## Alessio3

What a great thread! Thanks!

----------


## mr.Rope

> I don't get that - it directs to www, not forum for me.


Gah, I must've been talking about the wrong thumb pages here. I was referring to the ones listed in the very first post in this thread, posted all the way back in 2009. If snowlorenzo was having problems with some other page, then that's another story.

(BTW, I just noticed that the issue I was talking about (and its solution) have been mentioned in this thread before (the last two posts on page 8, at least). So it appears that there's nothing new here. My bad, should've checked at least one of the previous pages before posting this same stuff here again.)

----------


## Irbis

for some reason it doesn't work for me. I mean upon clicking on the thumbnails - it leads me to page that doesn't exist  :Frown:

----------


## ChickPea

This thread is pretty old and hasn't been updated in a long while. I haven't read through all of it, but if you want to see thumbnails of all maps posted in the Finished Maps thread, you can use this link...

http://www.cartographersguild.com/finished_thumbs.php

You can also use the Gallery link in the top menu.

----------


## Irbis

> This thread is pretty old and hasn't been updated in a long while. I haven't read through all of it, but if you want to see thumbnails of all maps posted in the Finished Maps thread, you can use this link...
> 
> http://www.cartographersguild.com/finished_thumbs.php
> 
> You can also use the Gallery link in the top menu.


Oh I did seen the thumbnail. Its just the full res version that are missing. Which is a shame because some of those maps are truelly beautiful!

----------


## - Max -

If you cleack on each thumb, you'll see the version as the used uploaded in the finished threads.

----------

