Thanks both. Useful discussion.
I think it is one thing for the BAA to ignore images uploaded to social media, it just seems a loss that the BAA is not archiving images its members have uploaded to their BAA member pages.
People are fundamentally quite lazy, and for someone like me [very lazy] who are not devoted to just one section, the thought of having to research each time the file name requirements of the Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Lunar, Solar, Comet, Meteor, M&V sections each time to submit an observation to the archive is just a non-starter.
Most of my observations are not very good, but they don’t need to be very good to play a vital role in an archive; they may show a feature was really there and not an artefact, or fill in a gap in a time line… For bog standard BAA members like me, there are few [if any] personal benefits from going to all the additional effort to submit to the Section archives when my observation is already on my member page for others to look at and comment on; the only one missing out on my observation not being in the archive is the BAA.
I note neither of you have said it would be impossible to automate the process whereby an observation uploaded to the member pages be prepared in the background for consideration of acceptance into the relevant archive, at the sections discretion. It seems a shame that this is not an aspiration. It cannot be beyond the wit of man, nor outside the budget of the BAA. Maybe it is just not important, I don’t know.
It would be interesting to know what proportion of member page observations / images are in the relevant section archives.
Thanks again both, and thanks to all the various section officers who are the backbone of BAA; none of this is meant as a moan at any of you.
James