roger said:

Even if I agreed with all the technical points, there is what feels like a showstopper to me that's equally if not more important. Running a cooperative workflow of volunteers involves motivating people. A leader of such an effort can't just tell them what to do, or sometimes even how to do it. They need to gain their good will, evoke their interests, stimulate their creativity, and communicate with them in an open manner.

this is, of course, very astute. and it reminds me of something that juliet said in her recent post, which i will return to shortly... but for now, i want to concentrate on this, instead:

I coded it myself and ran it on a non-commercial, personal server. Neither the quality of the code nor the bandwidth to the hardware were scalable, and it wasn't my intention to run a full production site anyway.

i do believe you are mistaken about "the quality of the code", roger, in terms of whether it could _scale_ to full production. or rather, you're correct, but you fail to see the real problem. you followed "the conventional wisdom" which tells coders that they should _not_ use the file-system as their database, but should instead use a "proper" database, typically mysql... but for your purposes, that was a mistake, roger. trying to funnel all of your users, and all their transactions, through a single "gate" -- a.k.a., your mysql database -- is _what_ complicated your code and caused the scaling issues. what you should have done instead is to write a program that can be dropped into a folder _with_ the files for a single book, which then _administers_ the transactions involving those files. since most of the files are small, changes are not a big deal... besides, the fact is that most of the files will never be changed. even ones that _are_ changed will only undergo a few iterations. so there is nothing that's going to overwhelm the file-system... thus with -- maybe -- _ten_ people on a book simultaneously (at the _most!_, and more typically probably just one to three), and few files being changed, there _are_ no "scaling" issues... load is distributed across separate scripts in different folders. that was your main mistake, roger, especially vis-a-vis scaling. (your other big mistake, which increased your complexity load unnecessarily, was your failure to use intelligent file-naming.) your system can easily be changed to accommodate a site that simultaneously digitized hundreds of books, even a thousand... (of course, it'd be smarter to set the number to a few hundred, and not let a new book come in until a current one is finished, so as to avoid the d.p. situation where thousands sit undone.) but you carried away the wrong lesson if you think your code "won't scale", roger... -bowerbird