argh

Ok gang, it's back. On the plus side, Fiverr moving photo.net to Invision means that a whole team of folks (i.e. not a single hobbyist) is paid to manage and improve forum/gallery platform features. On the down side, it means that since nobody is paid to run PN in particular, nobody notices when it goes away until someone sends email to support @ CL. W're not involved with PN since we the Fiverr acquisition, but at least I know who to nudge at Invision since I was peripherally involved in the migration. (The root cause of this particular issue that site ownership had previously been verified in a manner that meant automatic certificate renewal wasn't set up, so manual intervention was needed. We've now added DNS records that should make it automatic in the future.)

Welp, it was that, or shut it down. Different intent. It was previously intended to be a standalone business. Now the priority is foremost to preserve it as a resource, and only secondarily see if it can pay for itself. We'd like to have it at least pay for itself so that it doesn't turn up as a giant cost center when The Powers That Be are looking for cost-savings measures. Nobody is envisioning some sort of wildly profitable venture here.

Whoops, my fault. Matt sent me the quote via Slack and I didn't realize he was quoting you, I thought it was his quote! Will fix.

Thread has kinda wandered off course. We'd love to keep the focus on what you want to see in the next iteration of the site. We've put up a page to describe where we are and what we're thinking. A couple points: 1. PN operates at a substantial loss. It would be nice if it could pay for itself, but this isn't an explicit goal or expectation of our future work. 2. Historically, the site seemed like it was unstaffed because... it was. PN had totally failed, and was acquired as an asset sale, not as an operating business. It's not easy reverse-engineering someone else's site. 3. CL had a choice of how to deploy our limited engineering resources. We chose to invest our time into stabilizing our primary business, which is what led to us being acquired, which is the only reason we're able to have this conversation at all! 4. CL students are really passionate and keep setting up their own communities off-platform. This is cool, but idea in acquiring PN was to leverage the existing PN community as a place where CL photography students would come to hang out and chat, since we weren't providing that. 5. A substantial number of CL students either already have photography businesses that they want to grow, or aspire to start photography businesses, and/or do a bunch of freelancing. This is why the Fiverr connection is pretty cool. Not everybody wants to learn new techniques, not everybody wants to do gigs, and not everyone wants to be a pro. Just like not everyone cares about photographing landscapes, weddings, birds, architecture, or portraits. But the venn diagram of all of these overlaps more than not. We want to enable and empower these conversations. What should we do?

I think I was able to restore the relevant templates from a prior version. Let me know if there are problems. (I took out the weird "loading" animation and the dead CreativeLive banner from the forum header, but it's still on the main site banner because that I think would require a code release, and I haven't gotten that far yet.)

Ok, back on this again today. I discovered lots of obsolete pointers to dead ad banners from years ago in the templates, so I'm trying to unwind those back to the defaults. (If you see an ugly brightly colored rectangle pop up somewhere on the site today, it's probably me trying to identify which part of the page the template snippet applies to. We no longer have a working sandbox/staging environment for me to mess with unfortunately.)

photo.net actually does have GDPR-compliant user PII removal. It's not very graceful and unfortunately leaves scars on the site (broken images, etc).

Thanks, @samstevens - it wasn't obvious to me that the template I changed would also do something to the top header, it appeared to only affect what is now a grey box next to the forum icon. (You can get back to the main controls by removing the /discuss from the URL as a workaround until I restore the old JS/CSS.)

Investigating, locking thread until I have more info or remediation.

The image has a .ru address. Grrr... I do not need this headache right now!

Whoa, that's super weird. I just saw it flash up as well.