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Nobody at Pbase answers emails anymore !!

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scherrer
 
Posts: 100

Nobody at Pbase answers emails anymore !!

Post Tue Oct 13, 2015 11:42 pm


Since july 2015, I have sent 3 emails directly to Emily, but yet I haven't received any answer ! What a pity... Pbase definitely isn't what it used to be !

:-(

richo
 
Posts: 247

Re: Nobody at Pbase answers emails anymore !!

Post Wed Oct 14, 2015 5:04 pm


scherrer wrote:Since july 2015, I have sent 3 emails directly to Emily, but yet I haven't received any answer ! What a pity... Pbase definitely isn't what it used to be !

:-(

Have you tried emailing: support@pbase.com ? Apparently, others have received answers from that address, although not always.

jwcoffman
 
Posts: 18

Re: Nobody at Pbase answers emails anymore !!

Post Fri Oct 16, 2015 1:24 pm


Pbase is running people off They don't communicate with members because with over 198,000 members at $20.00 a head at a minimum,they don't care! This has been going on for far too long!

imorozoff
 
Posts: 1008

Re: Nobody at Pbase answers emails anymore !!

Post Wed Oct 21, 2015 8:13 pm


Yes, 198000 registered users. But, that number does not take into account the "members" that registered for a trial account and not move on to becoming a paying customer. As well, the number doesn't reflect how many folks have given up on Pbase and moved on to better websites. I suppose the fact that at one time 708 users were online using these discussion forums and that was back on January 24th, 2005, at 4:32 pm. Today you seldom see more than one or two users on this forum at the same time. Speaks volumes, don't you think?
As well, there used to be 60 pages in a single thread on the PAD Discussion forum. Today that's dwindled down to 10 or 11. This site is not worth fighting for.

thresholdprod
 
Posts: 575

Re: Nobody at Pbase answers emails anymore !!

Post Wed Dec 09, 2015 6:33 am


But how much of that is users not using the forums but using facebook/myspace/ello/googletalk/"everything else trying to be a social site...." for communications and searching for their questions instead of asking. PBase was one of the first( and ranked highly in computer publications as a place to use for many years and one even folded taking evryone photos with them with no chance of recover without paying $75-$90 per cd of images, who remembers that company's name?) and when you had micro limits for photos on your yahoo profile+documents+photo albums and/or web page. The free Pbase accounts were amazing(original had no image and/or size of limits, no bandwidth usage limits(no punishment if poplar) but just had direct linking disabled). No had to pay to host 1,000's of photos(many free/non-donating accounts had thousands of images) but people donated to help keep the website and server's up. Pbase ran for years on people donating funds giving other's free rides for the quality that couldn't be found easy. Most every photosite had popup and pop unders but not PBase it has always been ad free. Sadly to many users loved the no advertising and wouldn't donate a few bucks/shillings/pounds/crowns to help keep things going and limits had to come in place. Instead of resorting to advertisements and pasting the website url on the images, PBase keep everything clean and smooth so it work with all browsers and you didn't have to have javascript running(massive extra security in that, let alone no flash), so PBase could be bigger, could have sold out, could resorted to full commercialization for monetary gain but the owner didn't. they stayed true to the concept of a site for photographers to share photos

Knowing the history, the PBase originally had slow responses and errors lasting longer during finals for the University's end of semester and end of year testing. The reason for that was the people behind PBase were in college and had limited time between cramming for finals, some social life and running the site. Somewhere sleep occurred but very little.... So there isn't a big team office figure out how to make money off you and get you to pay more for less. Nor are the making everything full of code that creates complex issues. Simple is better, look back and see how many people screamed and cried about Fb changing the profile page, the friends/news feed each time over the years. That they just rammed the changes down their users throats, while PBase has added options but not forced them onto people. While having people telling them how to run a website, funny that those people never bought a domain and launched their website to prove their "Super Genius" ideas were right.....

I used to answer a lot of the help questions in the forums along with several other users. We didn't get anything for doing it. We took lots of heat from pissed off people and had to remember that it was a frustrated person venting at their screen and self, not as us for trying to help them. Quite a few thought the $23 a year should buy them a several thousand dollar professional website with personal dedicated code writers, shopping carts(PBase was created for sharing photos amongst photographers not for selling but if people actually read the information about the website and the people.........) and all sorts of domain owner features. Peopel hated they couldn't use javascript freely to keep the bad people in check, which who wants to hear someone's stupid music play in the background that you can't shut off and worst holds up the page loading....So no javascripting allowed is a big plus. I was forced offline because of life issues and all the users who got free help, never ever bothered to repay their debt. All they did is leech and bitch and when their strawmen arguments/threats didn't work out, they swear they were leaving. Very few did. The point being the forums are slow to dieing because no one uses them anymore, just like email lists and usenet before that. Posting brings more posters. Replying to posts encourages others to do the same. I have seen it start and stop in repetitive spurts overtime on here and several other websites. All the people who started building the information on the internet with goal of making it the greatest source for knowledge since the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria are getting old and dieing, the people coming behind us who have had all this free information haven't added alot toknowledge base. Even wikipedia has a problem with people putting forth the effort to add to articles and create new ones. So what have you given back to make the internet more helpful? Posting pictures of your dog,cat, meal, selfie has very little value and just adds to the noise to signal ratio... What have you added to the internet to make it a better repository of information for all? Is it all behind your locked down profile(which all that information is gathered sorted and sold by the website so its not private just in commercial databases, you can't afford to the cost to see)?


Which your private images on Pbase are not being datamined by PBase, can you say that about any other photo hosting (social)website out there?


A second issue and one comin up as it does every year.....
People acted surprised and upset when the servers are overloaded on the big gift giving and family holidays. Think Christmas/Hanukkah/Boxing dsy/Kwazii/ect. everyone took lots of pictures and then tried to upload them for all their family to see, while also trying to see how the photos their friends and families uploaded. With just that it would be the equivalent of DDOS attack for the sheer amount of connection and packets of data.

Then you add every person who has just gotten a new larger pixel count(file size increased) camera as a gift and the flood/data surge is even worse. Every year the size of the photos becomes larger and larger which is wasted bandwidth. The tricky part with websites is you have low periods, average usages and high periods and rarer extremely high periods. You buy service to cover and run with average to high and most hosting companies will let the overages happen and just bill for the extra data in blocks(higher costs of course because staying up is better than being down until bandwidth clock counter resets). To further complicate the issue people upload the image from the camera without recompressing it smaller, making a several megabyte per file image that will often have pbase create the sizes and delete the originals. So several megabytes have been uploaded processed and deleted , now multiple that times hundreds of images and thousands of accounts. See the big cluster F***? How it happens predictably each and every year at the exact same time?

An an example/solution is, if you compress the files to the screen size you can reduce 50-75% or the file size of each image easily if not more. That smaller file uploads more quickly which also allows a spot to open on a port for another person to upload their images. Faster data and people getting done quicker meaning more people can do their thing ..... Bandwidth is not infinite and a mass user access can choke the whole system up so no one can get things done. Think of it like a bank, when people panic and go to withdrawal all their money in hordes of people. The banks can't handle it and many people get upset and are denied because of the people who used up all the resources(the cash in the bank's location in this example) leading to more distrust. Despite the bank having called the Government reserves(bank extra cash holding security area) and ordering more currency to be delivered, it takes time to get it there. Instead of being patient , panic/anger ensues. Instead of waiting until after the morning rush and doing the holiday upload later in the day or night, people keep trying to force themselves in and when their attempt fails everything they got through in partial upload was lost bandwidth, making the problem become like a hydra. If people just relax around the end of december things will work and if the servers are overwhelmed , don't you have time to spend with the family getting better photos?



It has also been made clear time and time again that the forums are not for contacting PBase Staff.Notice any post from them, every idiot jumps on it and starts screaming and posting non stop about off topic crap derailing the whole thread. Seriously last post will have several pages of people jumping on a dead horse. Which means PBase staff doesn't post in the forums because all it does is lead to hurt feelings and a$$holes not grasping the fact they ignored the rules for their strawman argument that Pbase's Staff doesn't answer or care. While everyone else is using the addresses in the FAQ's for help and getting responses. When they have made it clear in FAQ which addresses to use to contact them. Just because you think you are clever and figured out an email address and/or that there is a PM feature on their public accounts(Do you really think their personal friends and family are the big public accounts everyone knows?) doesn't mean your sending messages to addresses/contact points that they check regularly. If I(or you) asked people to only call on the home/office phone during a certain reasonable hours, what would be the response to someone calling in the middle of the night on your private cell? Mostly likely not one of endearment and the response wouldn't be one of wanting to help......


Now if everyone took to answering threads asking for help, explaining the issues and including the links to the FAQs because not everyone knows the right terms to use for finding answers. We could start to bring some life back into this place. Although that takes user efforts and no wants to do that. Then again this reply is too long for people to read, which they then complain that the forums are dead because replies should be 140 characters of less but lack content.... Social media has killed online discussions, everyone stays in their local private groups, don't want to risk a spammer or someone being able to google them....
Bill Freeman
"A picture may be worth a thousand words, but usually consumes the bandwidth of more than two thousand." --Gym Quirk
Many great words of wisdom and advice http://www.pbase.com/help http://pbasewiki.srijith.net/

dw_thomas
 
Posts: 481

Re: Nobody at Pbase answers emails anymore !!

Post Wed Dec 09, 2015 3:24 pm


Wow! Thanks thresholdprod, a bit of a rant, but some good perspective on behind the scenes reality. I know I've tried to help people when I can, but obviously there are limits to what the average user can do. I do fear that the general lack of response we have seen from emails to the legitimate, publicized addresses is going to seal the fate of this operation, and that is a shame. I do like what's offered here and had hoped to keep going with it, but my optimism is fading.

I have seen some claim the owners are making a bunch of money, but I think that is not at all likely. As I understand it, the images are being stored and served via a 3rd party (akamai?) which for the storage and bandwidth required for images is probably far from free. And one wonders what percentage of the "users" are paying subscribers. As such, having hired employees dedicated to day to day operations may be a pretty difficult situation. After all, a "real IT job" is also far from free, especially if it includes a typical benefits package.

That said, right or wrong, richer or poorer, I can't help but wonder how much longer this resource will be here.

All very sad ...
DaveT

dct
 
Posts: 50

Re: Nobody at Pbase answers emails anymore !!

Post Tue Jan 05, 2016 9:43 am


After reading this thread during my christmas break I sent a test mail to support@pbase.com regarding my yearly fees.
Well, I wasn't expecting an answer already in the next couple of hours. But I got it.

What does this mean? I don't know for sure, because I'm really just a quiet user, fiddling around my (hidden) pbase pages a few times a year. For what I need pbase (neutral publication of images, also for closed user groups, without going to the social media stuff), oufff, what a sentence... To put it short: It does its job for my needs and that's why I remain here. Not because it's fancy and has the newest bells and whistles.

And if I really have a question to the providers (once every few years!), I will get an answer.


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