richo wrote:I just renewed, but I don't have high expectations much will change.
Or anything, really, except for the occasional new support person who is here for a week. I'll settle for the place continuing to tick over so that all of our galleries and the comments therein don't vapourise.
richo wrote:As to answers, there are several active members who attempt to answer questions in the forum.
"Several" is generous. I dropped out of the forums for a couple of years and was stunned by what I saw when I popped my head in again occasionally last year. Back in the day there would be posts in Q&A every few hours at most. As of now it's been over 4 days since the last one (yours). As late as 2010/2011, that would have been inconceivable. The PAD forum seems to have turned into a pumpkin on New Year's Day, which would also once have been unthinkable. Even Show and Tell hasn't had a post in over 18 hours as of now; had that been the case 5 or 6 years ago the assumption would have been that something had broken. Now it's business as usual. One forum (Printers) hasn't seen any action since 2012, others will probably hit 2 or 3 years without posts later this year. The place is like a ghost town, and that's a slightly jaw-dropped observation, not a criticism.
There's one odd thing that I've noticed too; I'm not sure how well the main site is being indexed by the search engines at the moment. (Or how well the results are being ranked if they
are added.) Searching on the exact text in the captions of some images that I put up in early October still gets the correct hit. Searching on later images does not. I noticed this last weekend when I was looking for something that I knew I posted (in a public gallery) back in November, but a Google search didn't return it (and still doesn't, even after I confirmed the exact text). Most of the hits that I get from search engines these days are for older images which have a well-trodden path. The newer ones usually only get internal PBase hits either from the Search feature, or the camera or lens databases.