Coin gallery photos: Open or Closed to Comment?

[cogito]

What do people around here feel about keeping gallery postings open to comment?

I've noticed a few recent additions that are not open to member comment, which makes me worry that someone in the future could use ancients.info gallery postings as a means towards legitimacy without substantive comment from other collectors or experts in the field.

My personal bias is not allow for gallery posts closed to comment. If you are going to post here, it occurs to me that you should be willing to take the good with the bad. A public forum should be just that...public.

Jeff

[bpmurphy]

Doesn't bother me. Not sure what kind of legitimacy posting a photo on ancients.info is going to give a coin. The publisher of the photos probably doesn't want to have to keep track of comments and doesn't want to feel obligated to reply. Looking at the comments in the galleries, most are of the "nice coin" variety and not important anyway. I haven't seen any real discussions taking place in the gallery. If someone wants to have a real discussion about a coin, link to the gallery photo and discuss it.

The gallery is for sharing photos, not discussing coins. If someone wants to share photos of their coins, that should be encouraged, they shouldn't be obligated to discuss them if they don't want to.

Barry Murphy

[cogito]

So, what is to be done or what recourse is there if someone posts questionable coins but implies that they are authentic? Not allowing the community to comment in such a case may free those with ill intentions from any curb on their behavior.

This isn't a major issue for me, but it occurs to me that allowing substative discussion about coins within the gallery may only aid the usefulness of ancients.info.

BTW - while you are correct that the majority of comments are just complimentary, I would counter that there are resourceful discussions for coins in Marsmike, AlexB, 4to2centophilia, mine (cogito), and a few other's galleries. See the Kyrene KIONON overstrike coin in my collection as one such example.

I guess the main point of my query is reinforce the value of more open discussion, not closed and static images.

Jeff

[bpmurphy]

It's a gallery. There's no warranty, implied or otherwise, that the coins illustrated are authentic or not.

If someone posts a questionable image with overt claims of authenticity, the moderators are free to use their judgment to remove the questionable item or to edit the photo description.

Barry Murphy

[BeastCoins]

Jeff,

Personally, I look at the forum area far more often than the galleries, simply because of time constraints. If I saw a coin in a gallery and wanted to discuss it, I would start a thread about it and include the image instead of posting a discussion in the gallery anyway. Whatever works for each person I guess.

--Zach