Hi there. Several years ago, I started a project called Whoniverse Gallery and quietly launched it as a closed-beta. I was frustrated of seeing low quality screencap galleries that didn't really offer artists proper quality to work with, they were usually every few seconds and 720 only. So I made my own, it was twice per second, 1080 or even 2160! and had multiple versions (e.g. CGI variants) and even recons in actual good quality. And even managed to do new episodes before anyone else, it was amazing!
Unfortunately, this had problems:
Firstly, it was incredibly labour-intensive: I put quality over speed, which meant using tooling where automation wasn't an option because they somehow provided better quality in testing. This meant the process was convoluted and even with slight enhancements, it took a long time. It is no under-estimation that the project took thousands of hours.
Secondly, I didn't, and still don't, really know how to develop websites properly. I used Coppermine Gallery as my base, which was aimed at thousands of images, but I was dealing in millions! I misused it and load times of the home page (with features I loved and didn't want to disable, namely random pictures) took literally minutes. I knew enough to "hack" in caching and precalculation of random pictures and some other bits which made it a lot more reasonable but it was still crazy slow. This combined with other issues (outdated design and features and compatibility, upstream issues, wanted personal growth, etc.) meant I knew I needed to get off it.
Thirdly, AI crawlers. I never actually publicly announced it and asked people to keep it private for now, but people still shared it anyway. This meant it got indexed and eventually AI crawlers hit. That's one thing if it was fast, but as above, it was not. I had more than enough resources for the human traffic and basic web crawlers, but certain AI companies were hitting it at tens-per-second each. Even with Cloudflare protection turned to the max (to the point it caused cert renewal to break!), even with IP rate limits and user agent bans and anything I tried, it essentially caused a DDOS effect. That's one thing when not much else is hosted on here and I didn't need to care as much, but now I've started hosting https://tardis.wiki, albeit not yet on the same server, I do not wish to take that level of risk.
So while the project has been shelved for a while and I originally intended to just leave this site be for anyone who wants to use what I did manage to complete (while I sort out personal things and learn how to build it properly myself), I'll also be taking the site down now, I have to admit, even in the partially complete and deprecated state it was, this is actually fairly sad to see given the time spent so far. I'll leave the files where they are as the bandwidth wasn't the main concern (and it's currently feeding the !random bot on the Doctor Who Discord). Maybe I'll even turn on directory listing and add to it.
The long-term goal remains: Build something proper from the ground up with the purpose in mind.
I think my ideal is something Frinkiac-esque for Who and I've experimented with the odd other fun idea to include too. Maybe I'll build something in a bot first to get a feel for the back-end capabilities and ideas. I've been also thinking of having other high-quality images relating to the show. I don't want to tread on the toes of the amazing work of other sites, namely Tragical History Tour, The Black Archive, I'm not actually sure how much overlap of content I have compared with the various other sites as I've never deep-dived it. But one of the key things on my mind is while WhoGal being gone for a bit isn't relatively a great loss in the grand scheme of things; I, and I think people I've talked to over the years, get very nervous about vast troves of content potentially being lost, particularly those who have some reliance upon free hosting. I've already offered and have backed up some resources (mostly those by peeps on the Doctor Who Discord), and I would love to work with these sites and others to do similar. I do love the thought of a central home, working together rather than almost being a competing place. That's obviously long-term though and very properly after the core purpose is done.
Thanks for reading, please feel free to pop me any questions or thoughts or suggestions on the Discord or any of my socials. :)