kent_dellaire wrote:I sent an email to Pbase earlier today, questioning the same problem, too many hit counts, inaccurate counting and so forth. I checked my counts tonight and saw that they have been changed, made lower on each photo, and yet they profoundly disagree with each other, still. My photos no longer show up in the popular gallery. I'm new to Pbase as of 3/21/23 and I am not very impressed by what I have seen thus far. I'm thinking about asking for a cancelation and refund. I doubt if they will give me a refund.
I've always regarded the hit counts on PBase to be a complete waste of space. The numbers never seem to gel with anything (including the number of page views on each page). However the support for StatCounter and Google Analytics makes up for that because at least on StatCounter you can (usually) see the path that people used to arrive at your photos rather than just "here is a number".
kent_dellaire wrote:However, I can't stay with this whacky system any longer. I'm moving on.
Yyyyeah, the only thing is... yes, the internal stats are useless. Yes, management seem to appear on a 3 year cycle bursting with enthusiasm then within a couple of weeks can't even be bothered responding to basic support requests like
adding new hardware into the database. No, you'll never get famous here because hardly any images are indexed by Google for some reason. (Try doing a Google search of the exact text of some of your descriptions and see how few, if any matches come up. Some of my photos from 10 or 12 years ago will show up in a Google search. Recent ones hardly ever do.) No, if you're not in the PAD or Show and Tell groups, you'll get hardly any internal PBase visitors (which will affect whether you show up in the Populars), but post the same photo on Flickr and it'll be in triple figure views within an hour. Granted also, the number of photos posted on the site has been in decline for years now, though it has stabilised somewhat in the last year or two.
BUT...... and this is really what keeps me here, there is no other site that I have come across,
none, that has such a clean and efficient hierarchical gallery structure, with the ability to customise the page display via CSS.
Admittedly, I'm gradually changing the watermarks on all of my historical photos to remove the PBase address, and punching the descriptions and the like into the exif in anticipation that one day this place will go down and not get back up, so that I'm ready to reupload them on another site.
But damn, that display organisation is hard to give up.
If another site, one which has management who actually gave a stuff more than once every 3 years, were to implement such a thing I may be tempted to head for the door too. But none have. (Flickr does have the equivalent of galleries now, but they haven't done it well and seem eternally wedded to the pointless concept of a "Photostream".) So while I'm packing some bags, I for one am not walking out the door just yet. The display format is worth the annoyance. Most days. It's worth considering before you pull the ejector handle.