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Please sell out!

PostPosted: Sun Mar 07, 2010 4:43 am
by hhf
There must be a party that can do it better. pBase used to be great but at the moment it's only a shadow of itself. I guess it's founders are bored with it and not in the least interested in letting it work properly anymore. It's a shame.

Re: Please sell out!

PostPosted: Sun Mar 07, 2010 1:52 pm
by fishit
hhf wrote:There must be a party that can do it better. pBase used to be great but at the moment it's only a shadow of itself. I guess it's founders are bored with it and not in the least interested in letting it work properly anymore. It's a shame.


Opinions, everyone has one, just like everyone got a bleep hole.
The site seems to be working fine for me, no one forces people to stay.

Re: Please sell out!

PostPosted: Sun Mar 07, 2010 8:18 pm
by akmc_in_au
fishit wrote:
hhf wrote:There must be a party that can do it better. pBase used to be great but at the moment it's only a shadow of itself. I guess it's founders are bored with it and not in the least interested in letting it work properly anymore. It's a shame.


Opinions, everyone has one, just like everyone got a bleep hole.
The site seems to be working fine for me, no one forces people to stay.


Hmmm... there's a metaphor there somewhere. Perhaps a stack of them.

The high seas. A passenger ship, once shiny, new and state of the art, now showing her age. Scorch marks still surround a patch on the side of the hull showing where a boiler blew up last September.

A passenger races up to the bridge.

"Captain Slug, Captain Slug! Why is the hot water system (metaphor for StatCounter and Google Analytics) only delivering about 25% of the hot water that it's supposed to? It was working flawlessly and now all of a sudden... it only works sometimes! Are there any maintenance crews working on this?"

Captain Slug stares silently out to sea, saying nothing.

"The ship is still sailing! Love it or leave it! Love it or leave it!" cries a small but loyal group of other passengers.

Another passenger runs to the bridge.

"Captain Slug, Captain Slug! The doors on the ovens in the galley (metaphor for the Geotagging system) randomly fall off! Is anyone from maintenance looking at this?"

Captain Slug stares silently out to sea, saying nothing.

"The ship is still sailing! Love it or leave it! Love it or leave it!" cries a slightly smaller but still loyal group of other passengers.

Another passenger runs to the bridge.

"Captain Slug, Captain Slug, the revolution counters on the engine (metaphor for the stats system) are all over the place! They're giving numbers that make no sense!"

Captain Slug stares silently out to sea, saying nothing.

"The ship is still sailing! Love it or leave it! Love it or leave it!" cries a still smaller but still loyal group of other passengers, perhaps with a little less gusto than before with a few exceptions.

Yet another passenger runs to the bridge.

"Captain Slug, Captain Slug, the rope that holds up the semaphore flags (metaphor for the incorrect EXIF data) has snapped!"

Captain Slug stares silently out to sea, saying nothing. The ghost of long-departed second officer NoOutlet can be heard to whisper "arr, it be fixed on the development ship, it be fixed on the development ship, long before I went to Davy Jones' locker, arrrr..."

"The ship is still sailing! Love it or leave it! Love it or leave it!" cries a still diminishing group of other passengers.

A group of passengers run to the bridge.

"Captain Slug, Captain Slug! Why is there so much spam on the menu in the Cafe d'Forum? Where are the bedsheets phase 2 that you promised us for our cabins? Where is the ratings system that you were working on 4 years ago? (OK, I ran out of metaphors here.) Why isn't the camera that was released 6 months ago and which we e-mailed about repeatedly in that time in the ship's database yet? Where is the API?"

Captain Slug stares silently out to sea, saying nothing.

"The ship is still sailing! Love it or leave it! Love it or leave it!" cry fewer and fewer passengers who turn a blind eye to the rust, the increasing number of breakdowns, the lack of refurbishment and the crew apathy, as long as the ship hasn't actually gone under yet. In the meantime once-ardent supporters attach lifelines to the nearby SS SmugMug and the RMS Zenfolio. Some swing across onto those other vessels, abandoning the Good Ship PBase forever, others stay for now at least, but make sure that they have an exit strategy.

Re: Please sell out!

PostPosted: Sun Mar 07, 2010 10:03 pm
by fishit
akmc_in_au wrote:Hmmm... there's a metaphor there somewhere. Perhaps a stack of them.


Stack away and find your life line. Some ships age, and do it gracefully, others look shiny and new, but are lost in the fog.
I like a small fleet for my tastes, one ship never suited me before or ever will.

Re: Please sell out!

PostPosted: Sun Mar 07, 2010 10:41 pm
by akmc_in_au
fishit wrote:
akmc_in_au wrote:Hmmm... there's a metaphor there somewhere. Perhaps a stack of them.


Stack away and find your life line. Some ships age, and do it gracefully,


They do... but bits and pieces falling off when the crew don't do anything about it or say anything about it (as per all of the previous examples, even if they're not the core components of the ship) is a pretty stretchy definition of "graceful".

Re: Please sell out!

PostPosted: Sun Mar 07, 2010 11:49 pm
by fishit
akmc_in_au wrote:when the crew don't do anything about it or say anything about it .


The ship is old and does need more work, I do not agree the crew is doing nothing, they are working. Maybe just not as fast as you would like, but they are working.
I agree it would be to their benefit to inform the passengers more about the ship, but they do not and that is Okay with me.

Re: Please sell out!

PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 12:42 am
by akmc_in_au
fishit wrote:
akmc_in_au wrote:when the crew don't do anything about it or say anything about it .


The ship is old and does need more work, I do not agree the crew is doing nothing, they are working. Maybe just not as fast as you would like, but they are working.


I'm sorry Dennis, but... how do you know that?

There's certainly not much in the way of objective evidence of it. What was the last new feature that was introduced? That would be the stats system, after the crash. And though it's never been admitted as far as I know, there's always been a pretty strong suspicion in the relevant thread of the News forum that that was introduced because the old system just wouldn't work any more, just as the database itself wouldn't initially come back up after the crash. Let's face it, when you're recovering from a critical outage is not the time to be implementing a whole new sub-system unless your back is to the wall, especially one as flaky as that one was in the early days in particular.

Prior to that? Geotagging, which itself no longer works properly. And that dates back to early 2008. The beta was released in March, which is 2 years ago.

Aside from that, there's the new forum... which impressed me at the time, but having set one of my own up I now know that it's less of a big thing, although NoOutlet did some clever customisations. But again... 2 years ago.

Spam, reported spam, sits in the forum for days, weeks, in a couple of cases a month or two without being zapped, which hardly helps our search rankings. Something which, incidentally, PBase could easily avoid by appointing volunteer moderators with a brief to knock spam on the head, but that would be too much like innovation.

It can take literally months to get cameras added to the database; I doubt that such a long time to perform such a trivial action is slower than only I would like.

It's now been about a month since the StatCounter/ Google Analytics code stopped working properly; again, I'm not sure that 1/12th of a year is something that seems slow to me alone.

So, no genuine improvements, fixes only when things collapse completely... if you know for certain that this place isn't on autopilot with it only being worked on part time when something crashes and burns, by all means feel free to share.. but I can tell you now that empirically speaking? It's the way it looks to a fair few people out here as a stack of posts, not least the one that started this thread, can attest. If I hadn't come to that conclusion my own self I wouldn't have a SmugMug account now.

fishit wrote:I agree it would be to their benefit to inform the passengers more about the ship, but they do not and that is Okay with me.


I'm glad that it is... but I'm not sure that that gives me a warm fuzzy feeling with the number of passengers from my favourites list that I've seen disembarking over the last few months. I think perhaps you may not be in an overwhelming majority there.

Re: Please sell out!

PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 1:12 am
by amoxtli
Welcome to the "Question and Answer Forum: Ask if you need help using PBase" which as of late has turned into a forum for maligners, whiners, haranguers and complainers.

Obviously the "exchange" above is going nowhere at all and will doubtlessly go on and on in this thread and/or in others. I really enjoyed this forum when it contained useful information, so I would like to make the following suggestion that you continue your conversation in private via email. It's really not useful or interesting at all.

If you have a problem with PBase, do the following, put up with it, contact the PBase administration, or migrate to another site. If you chose the latter, please do so without "threatening" to do so over and over again. We're not interested.

If you love PBase or it just works for you, then bully for you, go out and take some photos.

Please let's make this a useful forum once again.

Re: Please sell out!

PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 1:39 am
by akmc_in_au
amoxtli wrote:Welcome to the "Question and Answer Forum: Ask if you need help using PBase" which as of late has turned into a forum for maligners, whiners, haranguers and complainers.

Obviously the "exchange" above is going nowhere at all and will doubtlessly go on and on in this thread and/or in others. I really enjoyed this forum when it contained useful information, so I would like to make the following suggestion that you continue your conversation in private via email. It's really not useful or interesting at all.



Sorry Walter, We'll take the gun that was forcing you to read it away from your head. That should ease your pain.

Re: Please sell out!

PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 1:41 am
by madlights
amoxtli wrote:Welcome to the "Question and Answer Forum: Ask if you need help using PBase" which as of late has turned into a forum for maligners, whiners, haranguers and complainers.

Obviously the "exchange" above is going nowhere at all and will doubtlessly go on and on in this thread and/or in others. I really enjoyed this forum when it contained useful information, so I would like to make the following suggestion that you continue your conversation in private via email. It's really not useful or interesting at all.

If you have a problem with PBase, do the following, put up with it, contact the PBase administration, or migrate to another site. If you chose the latter, please do so without "threatening" to do so over and over again. We're not interested.

If you love PBase or it just works for you, then bully for you, go out and take some photos.

Please let's make this a useful forum once again.
Yep

Re: Please sell out!

PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 4:31 am
by gunnarhorpestad
hhf wrote:There must be a party that can do it better. pBase used to be great but at the moment it's only a shadow of itself. I guess it's founders are bored with it and not in the least interested in letting it work properly anymore. It's a shame.


I think it's easy.
You leave, and everybody will be happy.

:D

Re: Please sell out!

PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 5:38 am
by arshutterbug
akmc_in_au wrote:A passenger races up to the bridge.


I submitted a support request several months ago and never got a response. The problem still hasn't been fixed. PBase was going downhill many months before the crash last year. It is likely that the problem started years ago, finally manifesting itself in the problem that corrupted the servers. I used to get some of the same attitude from these people that simply refuse to admit that a problem exists. I'd say that my uploads were failing, only to be told that I should make my uploads smaller. If it worked before, why isn't it working now? Yeah, don't care, but I don't have any problems when I upload my picture-a-day! Nothing wrong here!

What I notice is that nobody seems to be maintaining PBase anymore. If this small company is really having problems, the owners should at least tell us so that we might be able to do something to help. Forum volunteers to post status updates and answer questions about problems, for example, could help to improve communication. Instead, requests go unanswered for months to years, and the pricing never seems to change. I'm still waiting for that unlimited storage option and printing service that was supposed to be available soon.

PBase is in need of fixing, and if that means more people to support the services, then PBase should be making new jobs. It charges enough money to be able to make new jobs!

Re: Please sell out!

PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 11:04 am
by fishit
amoxtli wrote:WWelcome to the "Question and Answer Forum: Ask if you need help using PBase" which as of late has turned into a forum for maligners, whiners, haranguers and complainers.


Yes I agree the whining does not help, your excused ...

Re: Please sell out!

PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 5:39 pm
by akmc_in_au
fishit wrote:
amoxtli wrote:WWelcome to the "Question and Answer Forum: Ask if you need help using PBase" which as of late has turned into a forum for maligners, whiners, haranguers and complainers.


Yes I agree the whining does not help, your excused ...


Quite. Anyone who dares mention any shortfall in PBase's service is a "whiner" and a "haranguer" or a "maligner" or a "complainer". Rather than sticking to the issues, far better to do as Walter did and resort to name calling. That certainly makes the world a much better place.

Re: Please sell out!

PostPosted: Mon Mar 08, 2010 6:12 pm
by amoxtli
akmc_in_au wrote:
fishit wrote:
amoxtli wrote:WWelcome to the "Question and Answer Forum: Ask if you need help using PBase" which as of late has turned into a forum for maligners, whiners, haranguers and complainers.


Yes I agree the whining does not help, your excused ...


Quite. Anyone who dares mention any shortfall in PBase's service is a "whiner" and a "haranguer" or a "maligner" or a "complainer". Rather than sticking to the issues, far better to do as Walter did and resort to name calling. That certainly makes the world a much better place.


I don't name call, I call a spade a spade and that's all and I did stick to the issues. Like I wrote, if you have a problem do something about it. I will list the options again, put up with it, contact the PBase administration, or migrate to another site.

Posting your complaints here over and over over again here will bring nothing, and this is the Questions and Answer Forum after all. Why don't you write to PBase and post the answer (if you get one) here? Now that would be useful, or post any other information that would be useful to us. I would love to read it. I think we're all quite aware of the many problems this site has, but complaining about it on this forum does nothing, so let's try to do something about it. If everyone of us wrote to PBase (a petition perhaps) that might make a difference. I already have, received no answer, but maybe you will. Having a secondary site as a back-up plan is definitely a good idea too.