Messages

31

Shipping News and information / Re: ships sold for scrap

« on: April 29, 2021, 07:27:20 PM »

CHRISTOS XXIV (IMO 7041625) is reportedly towing VARZUGA (IMO 7500401) for scrap in Aliaga, Turkey. The 1977-built product tanker, ex-UIKKU, is famous for being the first large ship to be equipped with Azipod propulsion (in 1993) as well as the first non-Soviet ship to transit the Northern Sea Route (in 1997). The ship lost propulsion and steering last year in the ice-covered Gulf of Ob and was towed to Murmansk where it was laid up for a year.

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Shipping News and information / Re: Suez Canal blockage by Ever Given

« on: March 26, 2021, 10:08:05 PM »

The maximum lift of any helicopter in service ..the USA  CH-53 Super Stallion = 33 ton

That's the maximum takeoff weight, not the maximum lifting capacity. The maximum external payload is 16.3 tonnes.

The bigger and more powerful Mil Mi-26, which has actually been used to unload ships in the past, can transport 20 tons of cargo but I don't know what's the maximum external payload.

33

Site related news, functions and modules / Re: "Liking" photos and "Most-viewed" gallery

« on: March 18, 2021, 05:11:33 PM »

I did because I might be wrong but you may not be aware of the function : Comments to my photos (in combination with "comments made by me"). You will find that by clicking on "My Photos"on the very top of the page, underneath your name. It helps me answering late comments and dealing with late reactions to a discussion I was involved in.

Thanks for the info! I was not aware of the possibility of "tracking" past discussions in this way. So convenient!

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Site related news, functions and modules / Re: "Liking" photos and "Most-viewed" gallery

« on: March 18, 2021, 12:35:53 PM »

At the moment, our front page has a total of five photographs: three most viewed, one latest, and one random photograph. The sixth is a screenshot from the latest video.

If you compare it to FleetPhoto, which could be considered as the Russian equivalent of Shipspotting.com, the difference is striking:

https://fleetphoto.ru/

- 11 "most popular" photographs
- one photograph from a "photo contest" (no idea)
- 63 recently added photographs
- 21 random photographs

Could we develop our front page to a similar direction?

I like the "most viewed" section regardless of how the views are generated - it's just this site's "what's hot today" collection regardless of if it's due to high quality photographs, topical content, or hot discussion. Instead of the top three, that could be expanded to, say, top ten? Or include the other "most viewed" categories as well (day, week, month, year, ever)? I wouldn't count out external referrals - is that really a problem?

Showing a wider spread of fresh photographs would mean that more shipspotters would get attention to casual visitors before their work is buried in the archives.

Similarly, a bigger selection of random photographs would attract more attention to the 2.7+ million photographs currently uploaded to the site, especially those buried deep in some less-visited or more-populated categories.

edit: ...and yes, it's possible to view photographs by diving deep into the site, but personally I'd prefer stopping by at the front page from time to time just to see if the great lottery machine has given me a prize in form of an interesting photograph. That's actually what I do with FleetPhoto...

edit 2: As for the original topic, yes, it doesn't hurt to use the site with a positive spin and give people comments when their photographs spark joy, not to mention starting an actual discussion under the photograph...

35

Shipping News and information / Re: Cruise Ship Drydock Lloyd Werft Could Close Down

« on: February 22, 2021, 03:53:23 PM »

Not to mention that Meyer has invested quite a lot to Turku shipyard in recent years, including adding a second crane.

36

Shipping News and information / Re: Cruise Ship Drydock Lloyd Werft Could Close Down

« on: February 20, 2021, 11:40:35 AM »

I think Meyer Werft should not buy the shipyard so that they can secure future work on the yards it already owns in Germany and Finland.

37

Shipping News and information / Re: Satoshi concept fails

« on: February 07, 2021, 10:54:01 AM »

It has been just a week since the last time the vessel sailed under its own power. They are probably just waiting for a slot to transit through the canal.

38

Site related news, functions and modules / Re: Proposal: Twitter card for Shipspotting.com

« on: January 26, 2021, 10:19:28 AM »

I apologize for mixing technical jargon to my earlier texts; some of it was directed more towards the people responsible for this website's background functionality rather than the casual users.

No, I did not ask Maksim Abramov for a permission to post a link to his photograph on my Facebook page. I don't have to do that as long as the content is freely accessible and legally available on a public website such as Shipspotting.com. However, downloading the photograph and posting it on my Facebook page without permission would have been a copyright infringement.

However, I acknowledge that I probably should have not used his photograph as an example in my earlier post; I have replaced it with one of my own.

Maksim's photograph was actually the reason why I proposed adding the Twitter preview functionality to Shipspotting.com. The ice-strengthened container ship Venta Maersk passing ice fishermen in Saint Petersburg would have fallen within the interests of my followers, but as the link would have been "text only" without a visual cue, it would have been lost in the feed and thus I didn't bother tweeting it.

I understand your sentiment with regard to linking, but consider that we are talking about the most basic functionality of the World Wide Web. The only way to retain absolute control of one's photographs is to not post them online at all. Some people do that and that's their right, but many don't and that's why we can have websites like Shipspotting.com in the first place. In a way, it's a calculated risk: you're not giving up your rights, but someone may copy your photographs without your permission. Or post a link to them.

Of course, the "link preview" I have discussed here is a more recent invention compared to just a bare URL and relates to more advanced and dynamic web platforms. Few years ago there was discussion about its legality and introducing a possible EU "link tax" for social media and the like. I don't know where that has gone since then but people fought hard against such restrictions. I might have also signed the petition against it.

39

Site related news, functions and modules / Re: Proposal: Twitter card for Shipspotting.com

« on: January 25, 2021, 05:08:05 PM »

Of the three social media I use, only Twitter cannot form a preview without having the metadata on the website; both Facebook and LinkedIn already automatically generate the kind of preview card I'm looking for. I presume Twitter will eventually adopt similar algorithms, but including the relevant tags to the source code already now would immediately give Shipspotting.com better control over how the linked content is presented there as well as discourage posting users' photographs (with or without link) as a visual cue.

As for online forums, the automatic preview functionality seems to fail at least on some platforms due to lack of "oEmbed / OpenGraph tags" in Shipspotting.com. While the BB code still works on most forums, that's another thing that should be fixed as more users switch to various WYSIWYG editors instead of formatting their messages with tags. The same applies to websites and blogs - I don't recall ever using HTML when I wrote a blog in Blogger almost ten years ago...

40

Site related news, functions and modules / Re: Proposal: Twitter card for Shipspotting.com

« on: January 24, 2021, 02:25:13 PM »

I do not know whether my photos are considered interesting, but I do not want to see them being shared on a social medium like Twitter. So I am not in favour of this proposal.

Note that the Terms and Conditions you have accepted when uploading photographs to Shipspotting.com already states the following:

To promote contributing photographers and increase traffic to the Website, Shipspotting reserves the right to make available links to submitted photos for other websites or applications (hereafter 3:rd Party) to incorporate as part of their service. Linking to material on the Internet is common and not an issue in itself, but to be clear on how pictures submitted to Shipspotting.com might be used, this paragraph was created.

Following conditions apply:

• Third Party will be able to display a picture from Shipspotting at their website or application
• The picture will NOT be available in full size with 3rd Party but only as thumbnail. The size of the thumbnail might however differ from size at www.shipspotting.com.
• Third Party has the right do display the thumbnail only.
• The user will be redirected to www.shipspotting.com for the full picture
• Under all circumstances photographers name and copyright shall be presented directly in relation to the thumbnail and a link to Shipspotting will be present.
• Third Party has no right to re-distribute, resell or in any other way transfer or display content delivered through the Service to any other party.
• Shipspotting reserves the right to charge 3:rd Party a fee for this service if applicable.

In my opinion a Twitter Card falls under this clause as Twitter is a third-party website/application and the preview is considered as a thumbnail. As I said before, the website already offers HTML and BB code for including photographs to websites, online forums etc. - the link is under every photograph.

In my opinion, providing this functionality will benefit the community as it encourages tweeting a link to Shipspotting.com rather than including the photograph to the tweet (at worst without any reference), in which case it will be included in the Twitter account's media library.

edit: Shipspotting.com already has the functionality to generate a "preview card" for Facebook (or Facebook's algorithms are smarter); see attached example. I would like to see something similar for Twitter.

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Site related news, functions and modules / Proposal: Twitter card for Shipspotting.com

« on: January 24, 2021, 10:55:41 AM »

From time to time, I'd like to share an interesting photograph from Shipspotting.com in Twitter. However, the site lacks the function to generate a "Twitter Card":

https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-for-websites/cards/overview/abouts-cards

Since a bare link does not attract attention to the tweet as much as visual content, some Twitter users include (a low-resolution version of) the photograph in their tweet. However, this is problematic from copyright point of view.

Would it be possible to include the necessary metadata to the photograph pages so that including a link to Shipspotting.com would generate, say, a Summary Card:

https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-for-websites/cards/overview/summary-card-with-large-image

After all, we already have the thumbnail code generator for websites and forums.

42

Shipping News and information / Re: 2020 is the year of death for many vessels

« on: January 21, 2021, 09:16:22 AM »

What's the impact of fluctuating scrap price on the recycling of passenger ships which, compared tankers and container ships, must be more labor intensive to break and include a lot of non-valuable materials as well? The scrap prices has been increasing steadily, but there was a sudden drop in $/ldt scrap prices last week.

https://www.tradewindsnews.com/shipbroking/scrap-prices-fall-sharply-as-negotiations-grind-to-a-halt/2-1-948395

43

Site related news, functions and modules / Re: posting and claiming other people's photographs

« on: January 10, 2021, 01:09:51 PM »

A poster from Russia has pointed out that copyright law in that country is significantly different to many others...

In Russia, the "problem" is not the copyright law itself but how (little) intellectual property rights such as copyright are respected not only among the online community, but also in business etc.

I think Shipspotting.com Copyright Policy is rather clear with this respect. However, should it be revised to better address the potential issue?

44

Site related news, functions and modules / Re: Site policemen

« on: January 09, 2021, 02:05:05 PM »

This kinda reminds me of those times when some users raised a ruckus about photographs that they did not consider "good enough" getting too many views and ending up on the front page under "most viewed". Sometimes photographers were even blamed for e.g. spamming the link elsewhere just to get more views.

Edit: However, I acknowledge that we need a clear policy with regard to posting photographs taken by someone else. I also want to keep Shipspotting.com as a site that respects copyright.

45

Shipping News and information / Re: Carnival ship sales

« on: December 10, 2020, 11:24:12 AM »

I'm fairly sure Carnival would be quite willing to part ways with one of the Fantasy-class ships that are still afloat if someone wants to "save" one. No need to drag ship that's hardly unique off the scrap heap...

Personally, I'm happy to see old tonnage leave the worldwide fleet. Once the industry picks up, the shipyards can build new vessels that actually meet today's environmental requirements, client expectations etc.