FlightGear wiki:Archiving screenshot of the month contest entries

This article documents the process of archiving the Screenshot of the month (SOTM) contest entries on the wiki.

The Screenshot of the month (SOTM) contest have been held in the Media subforum likely since June 2015, possibly not continuously. The rules have varied slightly but in general there have been up to fifteen screenshots submitted and the forum members have had 3-4 votes to spread across the entries. In some cases there have been ties and more than one entry have been declared winner.

Reasoning

The reasons for uploading all SOTM entries include:

• The incredibly high quality of recent submissions.
• The distinct lack of images for the pictures of the week shown on the front page of the wiki.
• The awesome screenshots can be used in the galleries of the specific aircraft wiki pages.
• Archiving: if you look at very old forum topics you'll find many included forum images now missing. For example there is already one image no longer visible in the March 2019 SOTM topic on the forum and one image lost in the February 2019 SOTM topic on the forum .

Procedure for uploading

The procedure used for a single month's competition is:

• Download each SOTM entry and save it with the name SOTM [YYYY]-[MM] [TITLE] by [AUTHOR].jpg. Here [YYYY] is the year and [MM] is the month, for example 2024-12, and [TITLE] by [AUTHOR] is the text under the screenshot.
• Manually convert PNGs to JPGs. This should hopefully not be required as submitting JPG images is part of the rules.
• Upload all files at once to the wiki.
• Upload failures: Duplicated content (due to the winner already being uploaded to the wiki) - open the other file in another window or tab, add the subcategory, and remove it from the upload list.
• Uploads failures: Make sure JPGs are not actually renamed PNGs.
• Upload failures: Decrease the file size (i.e. change any 100 JPG compression levels to 95).
• Set the author to a temporary value of X and set the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
• Set the date and new category on the first file and copy these 2 bits of info to all subsequent files. For example the new category, which is a subcategory of Category:Screenshot of the month, should be named Category:Screenshot of the month/2024-12.
• Add a title by copying the file name on the upload page, and adding a :.
• Finally edit the uploaded files to fix the author names.