Welcome to pBase

[sngreen]

About a year ago almost by accident I opened a flickr account, for one good price of a terabyte for free. They changed quite a lot in their layout, the pages look fantastic, they load fast, and overall I have been more than satisfied with what they offer. I have not been following the pbase news, and perhaps I missed the mention of it, but have there been any innovative improvements in pbase services between now and almost a decade ago? I don't even come here that often; in the past when I tried to link the images from my pbase galleries they would often show as empty place holders boxes on the pages where they were meant to be seen (the urls would not be valid in a few months time); just tried to find few specific images, a good portion of them are either scrambled or blacked out completely [http://www.pbase.com/sngreen/image/159408002/original.jpg] - how satisfied are you people with this service? Is it even worth the time, expense, or are you finding it acceptably ok for the most of it? I am just being curious.

http://www.pbase.com/sngreen
https://www.flickr.com/photos/sergey-green

[gemmf]

I've been with PBase for about 10 years now and I'd been happy with them all this time. But, about a month ago, I made a payment for my subscription which didn't get added to my account. I made an enquiry about this and after nearly 4 weeks, I'm still waiting for them to sort it out. Only one person seems to be replying to my messages (after a long delay), so, to answer your question, I'm not satisfied.

BTW, I've randomly checked your galleries, and your images seem to be showing fine (the ones I've clicked).

[dw_thomas]

I've been here since 2004 and I like the flexibility of galleries and sub-galleries and the degree of user customization available. I could hardly claim the site is problem free, of course, Flickr and others occasionally have a bad day too. The biggest negative here is that response to complaints and problems is slow and one can be easily left with the impression this operation is a sort of hobby that is on back burner for the owners. (Even that would bother me less if they just admitted it! )

Unlike some, I have no interest in seeing PBase turn into a social networking hub, I want it to display my pictures. I would like to see the stuff that is or was here work reliably. (I don't use it, but there has apparently been some sort of problem with GPS related stuff unresolved for a year or more.) I've observed that the "Daily aggregate" count seems to be on about a 26 hour cycle -- it updates later and later each day. Again, not life-threatening but one wonders what it means.

As to storage, I resize my stuff before upload and the 15K+ images haven't eaten up 2GB yet, so I'm not seduced into the lure of terabytes and the cost is pretty much pocket change.

I'm assuming that "interesting abstract" you linked to is a screen shot? Like the poster above, I did a quick look through some of your galleries and didn't notice anything out of kilter. And while you have some very nice photos out there, I don't have the time to look through all of them. Do you have any idea how long that problem has existed? Quite some time back there was a siege of broken galleries after a major snafu where a database server crashed during a power failure, although missing galleries were ultimately able to be restored by PBase if pointed out. But that event was circa 2009 as I remember it.

Could you post a link to a gallery or two that look like that example so an outsider could see if they get the same result?

If this place goes bust, I might be likely to move to my own website, as I get 10GB with the package I have. But that sure seems like a lot of work!

DaveT

[richo]

About a year ago almost by accident I opened a flickr account, for one good price of a terabyte for free. They changed quite a lot in their layout, the pages look fantastic, they load fast, and overall I have been more than satisfied with what they offer. I have not been following the pbase news, and perhaps I missed the mention of it, but have there been any innovative improvements in pbase services between now and almost a decade ago? I don't even come here that often; in the past when I tried to link the images from my pbase galleries they would often show as empty place holders boxes on the pages where they were meant to be seen (the urls would not be valid in a few months time); just tried to find few specific images, a good portion of them are either scrambled or blacked out completely [http://www.pbase.com/sngreen/image/159408002/original.jpg] - how satisfied are you people with this service? Is it even worth the time, expense, or are you finding it acceptably ok for the most of it? I am just being curious.

http://www.pbase.com/sngreen
https://www.flickr.com/photos/sergey-green

I've had an account since Feb, 2002. Technically, I was part of the "charter" group promised life-time membership for free which suddenly "vaporized one day" when pbase.com got popular. The main issues I have seen is that pbase.com apparently grew faster than the original team could handle. In the early years there were lots of new features and the staff was actively engaged. Then they hit the wall in bandwidth and volume. At one point pbase.com was up and down and particularly every few months when the volume and bandwidth hit a certain ceiling. Although they brought on additional help and added more servers, they ended up plateauing about a year ago.

Suddenly the responsiveness of the staff vanished and they went silent. This gave several of us concern that they were going under. I have seen one forum response from Emily this year and that is all. It would be really nice if the ownership would come forward and give the membership a state of the company or at least reassure us they are staying around for the near future.

I renewed for one more year, but I am planning to move my images to another site if the "silence" from the staff continues. One has to take measures to avoid what has happened with other companies that also went silent and then suddenly went under. I have a 1734 images taking up 393 MB. I am a long way off from having to pay for the next level, so the $23 is less expensive than even the most basic of hosted websites. The flickr.com option you have looks good, not sure how they do their linking to images. I use pbase.com more as my 'backend" storage of my image for my other websites.