[Raion]

I've been keeping this under wraps and only sharing it with a couple of people but we have a new gallery application in development. Everything will be migrated over but it will take probably a few months more to get it ready; it depends upon a number of factors. 

Let me explain why Gallery 3 has to go:

1. No PostgreSQL compatibility. As I'm trying to move a lot of our infrastructure over to that, I want to ensure that PostgreSQL is an option. 

2. In maintenance mode. Brad Dutton, the primary developer of gallery 3 at this time is not really interested in adding a whole lot of features and I completely empathize with his view. It's simply impractical with how bad it is. 

3. Provisioning issues. I'm sure those of you who have tried to sign up have been frustrated because email doesn't work and that's down to it not supporting SMTP properly, it wants to really use PHP mail() instead, and I'm not going to do that. Additionally even if it did it would still require manual provisioning. 

4. Future interoperability. I plan to bring single sign-on to everything here to better tie our systems together. I know keeping track of passwords sucks. I haven't explained how this is going to be done because I'm not 100% sure, but it'll probably centralize on the forum and a first login to another service will autoprovision it. This is not part of the first release of the new software, but it will be something added soon!

I wanted to thank everybody who has continued to be a patron or donater, and those of you who just contribute discussion, thanks too. In this case a significant portion of the initial costs were covered by your contributions, I know it's hard to envision our costs, but they can and to add up, though I don't pay myself for any of the work I do for the community because doing so would be scumbagish. 

If you want this to be done faster you might want to consider becoming a patron if you're not already, or participate in the upcoming group buy. At this point I've already exhausted the allocations of money paid to our developer that came from the site, so I'm paying the rest out of my own pocket. 

I'm going to reemphasize, if you have a problem with your gallery account currently I am willing to fix it until we launch the new site. Let's get you set up as soon as possible. I'm not sure what kind of pains might be involved with switching over once we have all of the backend code done as I'm sure there will be security in other issues to take care of. 

There will be more information about the group buy including a poll here. Because of an inability to find a good software I'm going to create a polling subforum soon. This is going to be a temporary measure simply to ensure proper access control, you will be required to have 10 posts to participate in the poll, and be over 7 days old. This is plenty of time for anybody because the poll will run for about a month. 

The redesign that this is bringing will also eventually result in a new wiki and other bits.