mrmrl wrote:shoshanna wrote:
Use PBase for fun, for sharing, for inviting critique-- but for your work, establish a dedicated site designed for that purpose. If you don't, and continue to expect PBase to be something it's not, you're going to spend a lot of time feeling very, very frustrated.
Ding! 22 pages and someone finally gets it. Thank you! To me, PBase is best suited for personal sharing and critique, that's all. You "professionals" need to get your own dedicated server if you are a serious business. Shell out some real cash to secure your own precious pixels, not rely on a ~$30/year 3rd party. That way when the s hits the fan, YOU get to stay up all night for weeks trying to recover it. Some people rely on 'teh-internets' way too much...
Only been a PBase member for three years, my measly 2500 photos are all right where I put them. I don't need a counter to remind me at 3AM that anonymous viewers out there are randomly or unintentionally clicking on my uploads, I know they are. PBase management, keep up the tremendous work! Just because teary eyed whiners can be the most vocal doesn't necessarily mean they are the majority...
Well, clearly calling people who disagree with you "teary eyed whiners" is a compelling and convincing argument. Almost insurmountable in terms of the raw power of its logic.
And yet... there is this small issue nagging at the back of my mind, what is it now?
Ah, now I recall.
Shoshanna made
a valid point. That doesn't mean that the others in this thread aren't valid either, however much you want to disparage them with tried and true name calling.
I'd never thought of recommending PBase for business use, because I didn't know anyone in that business (who didn't have their own site) anyway. But she's right, using it for that purpose would, I expect, be frustrating. However I
used to recommend PBase to friends. I don't, and can't in good conscience do that any more. Not because of the stats. I don't care about the stats as such. As I've said elsewhere I've never trusted PBase stats anyway, not that I'm arrogant enough to assume that things that don't matter to me shouldn't matter to other users, as some may.
No, it's because that nagging at the back of my mind consists of the words "what's next"?
When the power came back on, the database wouldn't come back up. That makes me wonder what kind of state it was in in the first place and about why there wasn't a "switchover" backup database as would be found in most professionally run places, but perhaps something has been learned from that... or perhaps not, since we're never told. As far as the stats go, does anyone genuinely believe that if the old system still worked it
wouldn't have been brought on line while the new one was developed? My take is that the reason that a new system is being developed is that the old one
doesn't work any more and if that doesn't work, it makes me wonder what else won't work
next time there's an outage.
And it doesn't even need to be an outage. It can sometimes be the arbitrary pulling of a feature like JavaScript. I'm not disputing the need to have disabled Javascript. I am, however, disputing the need to do so without bothering to tell anyone until they started yelling "hey, how come my gallery display doesn't work any more?" Similarly (although this isn't a PBase feature), I note the way that NoOutlet's departure was handled with complete silence. The one admin who at least
attempted some form of systematic communication with the members, with a handful of exceptions the only one who ever seemed to implement anything, gone silently. Was he replaced? Has anyone else left? Who knows?
Not that any of this will matter to those who just want to upload a couple of dozen images of Mitten the kitten frolicking in the back yard with the imaginative titles IMG0702.jpg to IMG0815.jpg. For those people, have at it because PBase is just fine for you.
But people don't need to be professionals to have more at stake than just $23 per year. The ones who take time to develop their galleries, to add captions, to put in hyperlinks to other images or sites, to develop .css's, even those masochistic enough to geotag; all of this takes time. It can be a LOT of time. And reproducing that work on other sites would also take a lot of time, though perhaps less than PBase since a lot of them actually
have APIs.
Which means that many, not all, but many of the "teary eyed whiners" don't need to be relying on PBase as a business to have more skin in the game than their measly 23 or 46 bucks. They have investments of time, effort and imagination. And therefore they have legitimate concerns about being kept in the dark by a site owner who seems to have elevated being disconnected from the paying membership to some kind of Zen like art form.
We simply don't know whether PBase has become so large or complex that it's gotten away from the ability of the current management to run it. We don't know why the "couple of days" has slipped so massively. We don't know what lies ahead for PBase. We don't know who's working there aside from Slug, or even whether
anyone else works there any more. Everything has to be taken on blind faith and while that's fine for Mitten's owner who could reproduce their "gallery" on Flickr in 5 minutes flat complete with value enhancing pretty pink and blue logos, it's certainly going to matter to someone who has spent days or weeks of work time getting their galleries the way they want them.
If you want to rely on that blind faith, then vaya con Dios. But for others, it raises legitimate questions about whether to persist with PBase or leave it to slide into Internet folklore as "Hey, remember that photo sharing site that used to be great, what was its name again...?"