Improve the site

[kstuebin]

I guess when you have 198,589 members at a minimum of $20.00 a head you can afford to sit back and just laugh at the rest of us!! Who cares if a handful of us leave..

I wonder if that number is accurate. And I think more than a handful are having problems. I've been experiencing slowness and trouble commenting for a couple weeks now. I just never said anything because what's the point. I see some people aren't having problems but I'd be willing to bet more are than not. Anyway, I fear just the opposite is happening. Maybe they're going broke and can't afford to fix anything. I mean we can all speculate until the cows come home. Then one day the site just disappears and we never knew what happened. All the complaining seems to have the effect of making them more resistant to telling us anything. I know that sounds really juvenile but seriously, how hard is it to post a message? It's like they've drawn a line in the sand and we can either accept it or not. Their position is we're not telling. I can't make sense of it.

[madlights]

I've kind of lived through the problems this site has had also...but many (not all for sure) have "eventually" been resolved, although with a very dire lack of communications. I think the thing that bothers me is the lack of real improvements. I like the ability to customize, etc that many other sites lack, I like the camera database, if they'd keep it up to date and accurate( which sometimes it's not). But Pbase seems to be lacking in many regards, such as the ability for android users (not sure about Iphones or Ipads) to reasonably view photos (and there are a lot of people who own androids, tablets or phones and some with pretty good displays) I'm not talking about what Flickr is doing with it's auto uploads from mobile devices, which seems to me gearing toward mediocrity and at least data overload. Just saying that it's nice to be able to view your own photos on multiple devices, or even edit in the field with some pretty good apps (Like Photomate for example)..but mostly just the ability to slide though photos with your finger, like most cameras now do.

[mikelong]

I wrote Ashlee at support yesterday and told her I'd send a list on Friday, while inviting her to get a sense of what's happening by reading the thread here.
Again, I have no idea whether this will happen, or whether any of this will help at all.

My membership expires today, and I don't plan to renew. A lot of work went into my galleries here the past fourteen years, but not going to waste more
time on a sinking ship, not when I've got two other sites with amazing customer service and modern features that consistently work.

For example, I received this from SmugMug today:

Hi Mike,

Thank you for contacting SmugMug. Your print samples have been ordered and I hope they are of help.

Please let us know if we can do anything else to assist you.

All the best,
Heather
SmugMug Support Hero

Best to you all in your continuing photographic endeavors
Mike

[amoxtli]

I wrote Ashley at support yesterday and told her I'd send a list on Friday, while inviting her to get a sense of what's happening by reading the thread here.
Again, I have no idea whether this will happen, or whether any of this will help at all.

My membership expires today, and I don't plan to renew. A lot of work went into my galleries here the past fourteen years, but not going to waste more
time on a sinking ship, not when I've got two other sites with amazing customer service and modern features that consistently work.

Best to you all in your continuing photographic endeavors
Mike

Thanks Mike. If you don't follow up with Ashley, I will.

Best,

Walter

[mikelong]

Here what I wrote to Ashlee at support:

Hi Ashlee,

Here's a list of issues & complaints from pbase members. I have decided not to renew my membership since I now have two alternate sites
with excellent customer service and modern, up-to-date features that are routinely improved upon. I've deleted all photos from my galleries,
you may delete my account. Thanks for the past eleven years.

Mike Long

Communicate with subscribers when they send emails to support and when they post to the forum. Lack of communication is your biggest issue and the most common complaint.

Answer emails in a timely manner.

Post a notification about the "State of Pbase" and the plans for the future. This has been requested at least as far back as 2010, probably much earlier;

Fix intermittent problems with upload and load speeds, and error messages like "The connection has timed out," "The server at search.pbase.com is taking
too long to respond," "Error 503 Service Unavailable," "Varnish cache server Not Found The requested URL/rolls was not found on this server" etc, etc.

Fix Geotagging. First reported broken 22 Nov 2013

Update camera and lens database regularly

Add optional e-commerce

Update and improve search function.

Implement a NSFW function that works.

Repair the login function. Members log in and then are repeatedly logged out for no apparent reason.


http://mikelongphotos.com
https://mikelongphotos.smugmug.com

[roothy123]

I was having a lot of trouble uploading pictures yesterday. Today it's the same, despite everything I tried - individually, batch, from different computer, etc. I even thought maybe I had used up my credits, and spent $43 for a site that doesn't work. Not sure what to do. Is there any other way of contacting pbase for help, or is it just broken beyond repair? My pictures don't take 10 minutes to load, they now just don't load at all. Two days ago some loaded twice, and maybe some didn't load at all - was too busy to check at the time. I love pBase and hate to switch after all these years of being happy with them, but this is very frustrating. Any chance of getting a refund if I want to jump ship? There are plenty of other sites out there. Stupid me for giving them $43 when the problem was not that I owed more money. Oh, and I'm pretty sure there have recently been a few instances in which I've logged off, but when I next go to the site, I find myself logged in. So I guess some people are getting logged off for no reason and I'm staying logged in. Hate to have two photo sites, but I'm about ready to explore Smug Mug, as several people I know use them and are happy with them.

[dw_thomas]

rsbfotos made a good point [edit: and now his post seems to have disappeared?! **]. Over several previous days the various viewing functions and statistics displays seemed a trifle flaky, but I just now created a new gallery, http://www.pbase.com/dw_thomas/pennscanyon, and added twenty shots, editing captions etc. and it could hardly have worked better. (I'm in southeastern Pennsylvania on a Verizon FiOS 25 Mbit line.)

It would really be nice if The Administration(tm) would provide a few clues as to what may be happening behind the scenes!

DaveT

** The post, which I swear disappeared while I typed the original version of this post(!) basically said that despite all the complaints he had seen it generally had been working OK and he wondered if it has something to do with where people are located. Honest, as I was typing the original post, his was sitting below the edit box, because I referred to it to get the spelling of his name. Oy, [cue Twilight Zone theme[/cue]

[fishit]

It is sad to see good people like Mike Long leave this website for really one main reason, lack of concerned ownership.
I post else where but still enjoy PBase and the friends I have here that are still here.
The price is right and it is worth the yearly fee, I do not post full size work on PBase so space is available.
I have moved some of my galleries contents to Smug but that was mainly security reasons.

It does puzzle me why ownership of PBase do not reply to email and why they just to no longer seem to care.
I load pictures else where but most other websites seem sterile compared to what once was PBase.
Very sad to see a once great site and what is one of the oldest photo sites on the Internet slowly dwindle away.

[amoxtli]

Something that has not been mentioned is the dwindling traffic on PBase. For years I averaged over over 2,500 "Aggregate daily page views". I rarely had less than 1,500 per day and never below 1,000. Suddenly this past August the page views went below 1,000 for the first time, and are now averaging about 1,100 per day, which is less than half of what they used to be.

According to statcounter, my traffic in 2014 was just over half of what it was in 2012, and will be even less in 2015. With all the error messages and time to load pages I am not surprised.

I don't know if anyone else is experiencing this, but I just wanted to add it to this thread in case anybody bothers to read this.

[dw_thomas]

I too have noticed my hit counts are down -- of course I've often wondered how they are derived and how accurate they were anyway. I actually considered maybe the latest hit rates are real and the earlier ones were inflated by some double count bug.

But nobody is paying me by the hit (unfortunately) so It's not something I'm agonizing over. I've got some recent stuff that's intended to go up, but have too many other things to work on for it to happen in the next week or so. Probably some new work would boost counts -- or not!

[reticulatus]

After 2 or 3 days of reasonable performance, in the last couple of hours the site has take a decided turn for the worse again.

Very slow responses and several "creating thumbnails" place-markers when a page does arrive.

Richard
UK

[imorozoff]

My list to improve the site:

- Sell what's left to new owners who are enthusiastic, tech savvy, motivated, visionaries, and will invest, support and engage with the customer base.
- Develop apps to view photos properly on a mobile device.
- Increase the minimum photo size from 800 to 960 to match FB. ( 800px is so 1980's.)
- Increase the number of CSS templates.
- Provide social media plugins for those who choose to engage in that manner.
- Improve speed and performance.
- Increase thumbnail size to match that of other popular sites.

[jwcoffman]

I wish to thank Pbase for fixing most of the problems we were having! It is now a pleasure to come here and use this site as it was intended.

[bassrock]

Something that has not been mentioned is the dwindling traffic on PBase.

I have noticed the same. Since the last phase of recurring problems a couple of weeks ago, I have noticed my daily page views have dropped by roughly half. I still get comments from my usual group of "PBase Friends" so I assume that casual visitors to the site have been put off by the generally slow performance. Or perhaps search engines have down-graded this site, so less traffic is being generated that way.
Either way, I have two months subscription left. Not sure whether to renew or not.

[amoxtli]

I assume that casual visitors to the site have been put off by the generally slow performance. Or perhaps search engines have down-graded this site, so less traffic is being generated that way.

I think both of these are true. I think the first can be attributed to the slow web site response and error messages. What casual visitor would put up with that? The latter I base on the number of inquiries I get. These have dwindled in the last few months.

Leaving is only an option for me if I find something comparable in terms of traffic and customization, and I have not. I have 500px and flickr accounts and have tried zenfolio, smugmug, picasa, etc. and I have not been happy with any of them. The best of these is probably 500px, but it generates very little traffic, and what's the point in have a web site hardly anyone looks at?