PBase: past, present condition, future

[sfbay_sail]

Hi:

we have seen here many messages about decline in traffic, future of the site, customer support, or rather notorious lack of thereof. Some of us are still here, and do not want to go. It is a combination of satisfaction with Slug's ingenious concept, inertia and sentiment. Let me recap from the beginnings of PBase, what was so special about it:

In the beginning of image posting to the web several sites offered the (miserable) service, many claiming Copyright to your own images(!!) , image sizes were limited, description also, almost like Twitter: 100 characters (Yahoo Pictures), one had to tolerate ad's and a rigid layout with white background and flash animations. And some got cancelled, like Yahoo Pictures, all was gone! They made or bought Flickr instead, and I am stunned that people even trust them.

Pbase was a revelation. It was Ad-free, with user definable CSS style, clearly stating that Copyright to all images lies always with their poster and owner. Site was Photography oriented, with ability to specify camera, lens and film. Yes, a film, remember that one? An entire enthusiasm developed around this site. Constantly new records of number of users and images were reported. A Pbase magazine was issued and maintained for several years (2005-2010)! There is not even a visible link to the archive (http://www.pbase.com/magazine). Activist and Web guru's like Srijith and Arjun made this a special place. A story of Slug and Emily starting a family was greeted with a great participation here in these Virtual Rooms. It was like being a part of a great family.

So what happened? Let me try to iterate my private opinion about the major factors: ( your mileage may vary)

1. Raise of Social Networking, 1st MySpace than Facebook, or Instagram. Photography alone lost its appeal. Apparently people felt attracted to exchanging messages, naming "friends," even disclosing the entire private life to strangers.

2. Sites offering free image posting, such as Google and Flickr.

3. Lack of proper customer support, not responding to users requests.

4. Emergence of competing sites, such as SmugMug with their excellent customer service.

5. Lack of evolution toward mobile devices.

Personally I think that we cannot steer off (1): It is among us, including the raise of smart phones and their cameras. The camera makers have to adapt and change their portfolio of products, and photography sites have to adapt to the adjusted volume of participants. The (2) is due to activity of software giants operating via advertisements. Obviously many people do not mind that their images are being scanned for content and that content is evaluated by behavioral analytics, used to being targeted by advertisers. The front end of google images and flickr seem to be enough for the billions of miserable snapshots. Its for free, this is what counts. Thus (2) is also like a force of nature, let these users move on from photography sites and treat their images as superficial as they seemingly do.

Much worse is (3), this is a self made crisis. So many frustrated users moved out and moved on after being ignored for years. On a few occasions Slug posted a 'mea culpa' message, promising an improvement, or presenting new stuff, which was expected to maintain and further develop the site. Nothing happened. In many cases broken features were observed for years, like the geo-tagging. My personal "mini wish" was to finally remove the ".jpeg" suffix from uploaded files, avoid the never ending job of editing these out. Never introduced though, and that was really a mini-change. Everybody has his/hers own set of priorities, I am sure. Just look at the dates in these "requested feature lists", or "News" forums, to realize the extend of years of stagnation, and... we are still around, still staying and not wanting to go. This is a phenomenon which Slug should not be taking for granted.

And now finally, the (5), the mobile devices. Lack of support here can be "the final insult." Just look like an image-page displays on a mobile phone. The standard text is microscopic in size, it is virtually impossible to browse through the gallery. When I point someone to my galleries, travelers or sailors for whom I make the short story about the adventures, they are stunned about this. They ask "why do you post with such a site, how can we view the images??" This is about basic HTML-5 coding! This must be rectified. 99% of users, or about, will try to view the photography on the phone or tablet first, or even only there. We do not ask for much! Lets just allow to swipe to the next image, or even simpler: just tap on the right for "next" and on the left for "previous". We need pbase code to automatically turn display for landscape images, like almost every other photo app does, to use the entire surface. Please fix the CSS fonts and page layout adaptation for mobiles. This is not much! It is a matter of survival though, as I think.

[mccartney]

Very well written.
I love PBase and hope that it does not disappear. There are still a lot of talented photographers on PBase.
For me, it does what I want and I do appreciate the occasional comment on my work - not as many as I once got, but that is okay.

[bassrock]

I agree with all of this. Each year I wonder whether to continue with Pbase when subscription time rolls around. For me, I have most enjoyed the PaD community but that seems to be dwindling faster in the last year, although some excellent posters still remain.
I think the lack of interest / concern / response from Pbase owners is what will finally kill this site. Looking back through this forum, the last relevant message seemed to be in November 2016, from Cami who announced herself as the new support staff member. Almost immediately never to be heard from again.
If I felt the PBase owners showed some genuine concern for the site and its subscribers, then I would be more inclined to remain as a supporter. But if they don't care...

[jimlarkey]

Agree with all of the above....this site is dead.
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=32807

[ssim]

When I first went looking for a photo sharing site there were limited options. Pbase was one of the ones that I liked. It was easy to use and most importantly it was advertisement free. I read the few posts from Slug and it seemed, at least at that point in time, he had a vision to the future for Pbase.

Fast forward many years later and it is evident that Slug was not ready for competition or simply did not care. Messages to admin went unanswered and if by chance you happened to get a response it turned out to be a bunch of BS because he never seemed to follow through on things he said he would do in the timeline he gave.

If only they had paid attention as competitors started up and added some of the same functionality as they had you would find more people on here gloating about Pbase rather than complaining about it. They had one of the early footholds in providing this but for some reason lost their way and playing catchup in a highly competitive market is a fools errand. I have stayed around simply because I like the interface but I have also got accounts on a few other providers sites who get the most of my traffic these days.

If I saw that there was a real effort to become more than what they are today I would drop the other accounts fast but history tells me we won't see anything new and exciting as long as the current ownership and management are in place. Hell it was last July when they posted anything to the news category of the forum and the one before that was November 2016. I would hate to see Pbase die but I think its a forgone conclusion unless they do something to generate new interests.

[ed1994]

It's a pity.

I have been here since 2004 and would never leave... partly because its not possible to download my images easily and partly because I have organised my galleries as i like them and it would take a huge amount of time to reconstruct, and finally I feel some sort of allegiance to the site after so long.

However as long as it keeps working I am happy. Pretty reliable for me, and that iis the only thing that I really need. The format is great as well.... no crap.. clean pages with no clutter.

[madlights]

Could not agree more with original post. Very perceptive observations. Especially the use of mobile devices and the ease of use they have in browsing photos...say the Inflickr app for instance for mobile devices, that I use on Flickr. It's too bad since Pbase has so many great features the others don't, even after all this time....

[kvogelphoto]

I started looking here in the forum after I requested to have my userid changed. There is no response and even their address support@pbase.com address gives two different replies, one saying that my message could not be delivered to the recipient. This does not give me confidence in what we have here. I like many of the features here and css allows you to customize your look but I can't get support for something simple that I could change myself if I had logon rights for the site then why should I bother staying here? Seeing the comments of others in this forum does not encourage me that pbase will do anything to help us out.

[tchaik]

kvogelphoto: this is exactly my experience, also

[mccartney]

Try sending an email to emily@pbase.com

[tchaik]

Hi, mccartney. Thank-you for this; I did email the emily@ address also (help@ and support@ just return failure errors), but have had no reply. The other two return errors reporting failed delivery, but are accompanied by auto-responses saying my emails have been received and are being looked at by the team, who will get back to me as soon as possible. But they don't

[mccartney]

Hi, tchaik.
Hang in there, they may be on vacation or something. I have never had a problem getting an email back from them and have communicated quite a few times.

[tchaik]

Hiya.

Thanks for the encouragement. This has been going on for months (truly) though, so it's difficult to remain positive!