Why NO answers here about site outage ?????

[char]

I have used tons of photo sites in the past 7 years and this is one of the best if not the best one I have used. I was one of the people taken by the Photo Point scam so I definitely was leary of paid photo sites until I can across this one. There are problems yes, but trust me there are problems with all of them and the ones that happen here are really quite minor compared to some of them. Hang in there it will be back up and running soon and then this will all before gotten until next time.

[rsilfverberg]

What Photo Points scam?

[andesheng]

Just want to jot a note in defense of Slug & his team. Currently there are 168,916 photographers on pBase with at least one photo upload. Out of that total 7,212 are registered users – that’s less than 5% of the user base. Presumably more than 5% of the photos on pBase are on registered user’s pages, but probably far less than half.

Writers in these forums ask why keep all those unregistered folks around? Think about the economics for a moment. Let’s say the average registered member pays $50 per year based on storage space used – that’s just $360,000 per year of income. That doesn’t buy a lot of overhead in any business. What the pBase marketing team needs to do is figure out how to convert a significant number of the 95% of non-paying users into registered, paying users. If they just delete the non-payers’ photos, they will lose a tremendous marketing opportunity.

I didn’t mean this to be a marketing discussion, but one idea would be to segregate registered users from non-registered users. Right now, all are listed together on the "all users" page, with registered users in bold. Not a great deal of differentiation there. I would suggest making the migration from non-registered to registered a bigger deal, with enhanced services available to registered users. For example, style sheets. Non-registered don’t get to pick from a list of options, registered do. There are probably a lot of different ways to show how being a registered user enhances the value of the site.

Slug joined pBase August 31, 1999. So pBase had been around for four years. It took over 2.5 years for pBase to reach one million photos. It took just an additional 12 months for it to exceed 10 million photos. Remember the dot.com company ad where the company portrayed got real excited when the first online order came in, and then quickly got scared out of their skulls when orders rushed in – in numbers beyond their wildest imaginings? I think that is what has happened to pBase. There is an incredible demand for this service, and the response has to be far, far beyond what Slug thought would happen when he started this four years ago. Growing pains are inevitable.

I think the key question, really, is what would those of us who are registered users do if the pBase database totally crashed and all our photos online were lost (this is a hypothetical). I think we would want assurances that when pBase came back that it was indeed stable, but then I think most of us would start rebuilding our photo databases with pBase. Even though we know what an incredible pain in the butt that would be.

The good news is that when the database is rebuilt next week, and our photos restored, we won’t have to re-create our pBase home pages and galleries – they will still be there. Better yet, this will be a wake-up call to Slug & his staff to ensure this will not happen again.

And if you are a guest reading this, think about becoming a pBase registered user.

[flashboy99]

andesheng, I agree with you on the features being for registered users.... trial accounts should be that, trial...

but, I've looked around at other sites, and I like Pbase the best....so I'll stick with them...... I don't want Pbase to turn into a Photki or something.... eeeks.. simple is best and Pbase has enough nice features without being bloated and unmanegable....

[guest in AZ]

sounds like the grid played a roll in our outage. slug will get it fixed !!

[char]

Photo Point was a site on line about 3 or 4 years ago that let people use their site for quite some time for free. Suddenly they started charging and it was mandatory. It was a good site so most people that used it paid because otherwise they had to tranfer their pictures. It wasn't long and the site disappeared. No warning no response from e-mails plus somebody even went to their office in Florida and it was closed down. It had simply vanished. A few months later they wanted to sell people's pictures back to them on CD for $25 a pop! As far as I was concerned that was like adding insult to injury! Some people did lose their pictures because after they uploaded them they deleted them off their harddrive. However I still had all of mine so other than being out the fee it wasn't anything except repulsive and hopefully a lesson learned.
I feel that not paying here is a good thing sometimes people don't want to use that many of the features and without free usage here it would so hard to learn to use it and paying members bring others in. 5 of my friends have become paid members here because I use it. (a couple got stung by Photo Point too) This is definitely a good place.