I've been away for awhile

[ssim]

Due to health reasons I had to put the camera down for the last couple of years. It was even hard for me to use the computer in any meaningful manner.

So I came back to upload some more pictures to Pbase since I am on the mend and am surprised to see the same old site that does not have any changes that I could see. At the start of my photography career I did use this site for sharing my photos with clients but it became clear that other sites were reactive to it's user requests and they made changes that made sense. More clearly, they responded to the user support requests.

It seems so quiet here in the forums which I believe is an indication of the activity on Pbase user sites. During my sabbatical my son had monitored my emails and did pay for my Pbase. This was a site of such great potential when it first came out and if you compare Pbase to other sharing sites that started around the same time you will find the other sites that have made big improvements while Pbase skates by on the same old interface with really little in the way of improvements.

Having come back and seeing what has not happened to Pbase it is a good time for me to just continue somewhere else. I'm seeing the same thing in the forums like they are not responding to requests or even simple one off user having problems. It is sad that they had such a great thing going but sitting on your laurels taking the user fees and not trying to do anything to it in the way of improvements. Out of sheer curiosity I used a site that calculates the value of a domain based on its activity and some other criteria and its interesting to see our great Pbase have a value of $81,303.00 while sites that started after Pbase like Smugmug at 23,202,855.00 and Flickr at a whopping 86,588,383.00. That is downright shameful.

[dw_thomas]

I guess one question is what you mean by "improvements." To some that seems to mean turning the site into F@cebook Jr, to others like myself it means making the stuff that's already here work like it's supposed to, and work reliably. Few alternatives offer the flexibility in gallery hierarchy and appearance that this site offers and I see it as a place to display images rather than do social networking.

That said, this past year it is becoming difficult to ignore that the place seems to be in a death spiral of neglect. There is a thread currently running about what to some would constitute improvements: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=48073 It appears the biggest need is for The Management(tm) to communicate, which does not appear to be among their activities or priorities. It's a shame things are the way they are at present.

These days I have enough space in a personal domain to put my images there, but it's more work than I would care to do if this place would shape up a little. The last day or so I put up some galleries related to a recent art show I'm entangled in and everything worked relatively well, with good response times, but recent history suggests that could be different tomorrow -- or this afternoon.

Enh, ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chances!

DaveT

[amoxtli]

Earlier this afternoon 32 uploads in one hour. (Based on recent uploads) That gives the idea on the amount of activity on PBase.