dw_thomas wrote:I honestly don't think the basic accounting has changed, just that the maximum size of a "block" of data has increased.
Agreed. This is a potted history of PBase prices, as best I can gather it from the News forum.
April 2006 and earlier (or as early as I'm prepared to search) - 300 Meg.
May 1 2006 - It increased to 400 Meg as per
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=21416#p124544Some time in early 2007 - It increased to 500 Meg, though this was not announced in the forums (
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=28385#p170365 ) I seem to remember that a banner about it appeared on my home page at the time, but I may be misremembering.
Some time between 2007 and 2011 it became 800 Meg as we can see from this announcement on 2 July 2011, which advised that it had increased to 1000 Meg:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=45609#p327121 (I could have sworn that when I joined in June 2007 it was 650 meg, but again I could be wrong.)
Then on 24 July 2017 it went to 2000 meg.
If anyone goes to their home page, there should be a line which reads "Time Left". On the right of that is a question mark icon.
In my case, if I click on the link, it takes me to a full account history dating right back to the time I joined. Every payment added 12 credits. And every month, within the first 3 days of the month, one of those credits would be deducted. It didn't matter how little I had in my galleries; one month meant one credit. So for July 2007, when I had a whopping 6 Meg in use... one credit was deducted on 1 August. I'm not sure what the cost per block was then, but as we can see from the above, it was somewhere north of 400 meg.
One year later, for July 2008 I had 47 Meg, for which I was charged... one credit.
Fast forward to July 2012 when I had 463 Meg - one credit. By that time the blocks were worth 1000 Meg.
No matter how large or small the proportion of a storage block is... as long as it's under whatever the storage block size is, it's one credit, month in and month out like clockwork.
dw_thomas wrote:Myself, I read the occasional whining about failing to make it a social networking extravaganza as almost frightening, as I see that as the last thing we need.
Agreed, we don't need another Facebook. Personally, I see no need for the one we have but that's a different conversation.
dw_thomas wrote:Complaints about interfacing with mobile devices are more legitimate, but don't really bother me much as my phone is just too small to seriously view photos, and my iPad has as much resolution as my desktop, so the conventional browser is sufficient.
I'm not fussed about mobile as such - I don't believe that ANY phone can really do justice to an exceptional photograph - though the failure to keep up with new interfaces like touch are a disappointment. My biggest disappointment is with the default image size still being 800 pixels. It was adequate when it was invented, back when 1024*768 was a big monitor, but with today's monitors it turns them into a postage stamp. Sure, you can post larger, but a casual visitor to the site will still see the shrunken down (and not very WELL shrunken down) "Large" size. Similarly with the slideshow option; you get the 800px "Large" size, and that's it... and no option of having captions.
I don't want big, radical changes at PBase either... but it
would be nice if its core functionality would at least keep up with the times.