New Look photo.net

You can choose a pic, click on it to see the options, make top cover, but you can't resize to fit oddly.

Thanks Marie or should I say mhc :-)

"the wisdom of designers who are far smarter than I am" Ted M.

That's pretty funny Ted...

It's taking my high volume internet, powerful & speedy computer, an average of eleven seconds to go to a next photograph !

Plus, they haven't archived or designed a retrievable way to access an archive. This would be the thoughtful & time consuming

customer written, service reviews. i.e. "Wedding Photographers" and "Camera Repair"

This site shouldn't only be about 'pictures', but instead a full service one stop photography lovers venue...

The new look is fine.. just gotta get used to finding where everything is.

BUT... its sooooo slow n chugs along like an old woman with a walker.

hope this is just something that is being worked on in beta testing?

I also noticed when leaving to the home screens in forums or anywhere else.. im not logged in anymore although using the back arrow in my browser will bring me back to where I am logged in again.

also no place to upload an avitar in the settings?

Hate to pile on, but ...

- When you write a reply in a forum, your first words automatically appear over the "Write your reply ..." and because the default font is so light colored it just looks like a jumble of mixed up characters. I suppose there is a way to change your font? I've tried a few things without luck.

- In "Trending" gallery, why does one have to scroll to the bottom to see latest entries? First off, it takes forever to get to the bottom. There is little scrolling allowed before you have to click "Show More." I clicked four or five times and still didn't hit bottom. It's very frustrating especially since the site is so slow. Also ... this is not how "Editor's Picks" gallery works. There, you can choose "Newest" to bring all the latest photos to the top. Why don't all galleries operate like that?

- Buttons labeled "Cate" make no sense. I believe you are attempting to abbreviate "category." I can not find any reference to "cate" being an appropriate abbreviation for the word "category." Instead, Photo.net should be using "Cat" or the less utilized "Categ." I believe calling it "Cate" is confusing especially to new users.

- In forum posts, what happened to the little colored icons that appeared with poster's names ... the ones that indicated years of membership, helpfulness, etc.?

edit time expired? cant go back to make corrections in 15 minutes?... I just did an edit and wanted to go refine something but it says I cant?

this is very weird.... Ill be back in a month when this is hopefully all worked out.

much too slow for my super computer to even explore the new features n menus.... frustrating.

EDIT.... 8:22est edit is now working... OOOOOOOoooooooo baby thats awsome!

ok so it seems these guys are on the ball.

so yeah lets give it time n deal with what we have n all working together, we will have photonet back in action... id miss m.

Reports are that the edit function has disappeared completely. I assume this is an accident. (If it's not disappeared completely, I'll edit this post to correct it...)

I'd encourage the maintainers to fix that and the logging out issues as a priority; then I hope we can worry about niceties like the personal details (so we can tell who we are) and making the mobile site work. But knowing what they're working on would be very reassuring, even if it wastes a little time!

the new site is too slow...the gallery section is a disaster as I have written elsewhere...the folks who did the re-design are in over their heads. REVERT.

I'm wary that if we shout "revert" every time an attempt is made at a redesign, the effect will be that we'll be ignored, rather than the desired effect of people not messing with the site! I do think there's plenty that should have been caught before the new (new) site went public, and probably would have been if we'd had some warning and people had been involved in testing. Still, we're here now. Currently I'm calling for some information on how the fixes are going (the only indication I've seen of the development team fixing things so far is that the "edit" button has disappeared) so we can tell the rate at which the site is becoming usable and what's still to come; I really hope that a few weeks of solid work and feedback can get the site into a state which is basically functional. Yes, that should have happened before things went live, but at this point I assume a load of new posts aren't being mirrored to the old site, and therefore will go missing if a roll-back happens(?), so that would also be bad. I'll accept some pain while the rough edges get polished, but I'd really love (us all) to know how much people are actually polishing!

To be clear, the change is almost universally worse for me. A number of systems flatly don't work, usability is down (even allowing for unfamiliarity), and the only thing I see as a nice new feature is the ability to sort threads both by the latest post or (what I've been preferring) their origination. Kudos, that's mildly useful, although not worth breaking everything else for. But I'm choosing to assume that I'm atypical: I'd be perfectly happy with this site working solely as a usenet group, because I mostly inhabit the forums - and I actively prefer editing in raw HTML (I've not yet tried to work out what "BBCode" is, but I assume it's yet another markup language to learn, whereas I already know HTML!) Presuming this is about attracting new members, I'm happy to take a little pain in order for the site to be viable and be more inviting. But it would be much more easy to be sympathetic if there was a document somewhere describing all the new features, the way that old features were going to be implemented, and the goals of the redesign. I assume the development team had to show this to management in order to get funded for the project, so I'm hoping that this is a simple matter of posting it publicly. I'm trying to keep calm until something like this shows up. Fingers crossed.

"To be clear, the change is almost universally worse for me." YES

look, the folks behind this have tried hard again - and it is better than Mistake #1 several months ago. But better than Mistake #1 does not a new web site make. It is NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME. Who decided that it was roll out time? How could they miss so many problems?

Found a bug when uploading an image into a gallery. It shows that I am entering a name and description of the image but when I save it and the image appears in the gallery the title and description are not there. I tried several times to update it but it would do the same thing everything.

Also, a question? Can one only now join for one year at a time? I see no way to join for the three year option?

GR

Thank you for your support - its one year at a time for now, but I believe it is set up to automatically renew - which is something we didn't have with PayPal (we now use Stripe because its more hip...and they offered auto-renew) Can you DM me your Browser and OS so we can try to duplicate?

ok its coming along.... I saw edit is fixed.....

log in still doesnt work from anywhere except the main page.....

next is the speed issue....

one thing at a time and photonet will be back to its old self... right? hahahahaa

hope so.

Craig/Alan: There's a "new posts" link at the top of the main forum view, which appears to work cross-thread. Is this what you're after?

Not entirely. The old Unified View was "new posts" plus old posts, with the new posts sorted first. The way "new posts" works, if I read some things and then refresh the page, everything that was there before disappears and can't easily be found again unless you remember which forum it was in. That's annoying and user-hostile.

The old Unified View was popular because it did what people wanted. Replacing it with something similar-but-different is always a risky move, and in this case I think it's a serious fail.

As others have noted, the need to periodically log in again is annoying. The old site would let me stay logged in literally for years as long as I refreshed it occasionally -- and by "occasionally" I mean not even daily. Now I've had to log in at least twice in the last 24 hours, and my guess is it would have been even more than that if I had checked the site more often. This is another change that seems ill-advised.

Another irritation about this is that when I log in, the site doesn't return me to the page I was on, it always goes to my portfolio. Come on. Every other site I use (Amazon, eBay, Facebook, various forums) has enough sense to put me back where I was after logging in. It's such an obvious thing that it's really appalling that you missed it.

I think it's a symptom of things like the screen name change not sticking. Nothing I change in personal settings seems to do much.

 

Incidentally, when I try to change my country, it's quite insistent that it wants an address. Given that I'm prone to posting "I'm on holiday" and "I own this list of expensive equipment" on this forum, I really don't want to give out that information...

Dup it and say My Street, My town,

Not entirely. The old Unified View was "new posts" plus old posts, with the new posts sorted first. The way "new posts" works, if I read some things and then refresh the page, everything that was there before disappears and can't easily be found again unless you remember which forum it was in. That's annoying and user-hostile.

 

The old Unified View was popular because it did what people wanted. Replacing it with something similar-but-different is always a risky move, and in this case I think it's a serious fail.

Hmm. What I describe above is what I saw when the new site first went live, but now it seems to be acting more like the old Unified View, but with the improvement that threads with new posts are boldfaced. If it stays this way, then it seems like a good replacement for Unified View.

I've been a paying & contributing subscriber for over 12 years, my most recent Dec payment is likely my last. That said, I believe that I may have been one of the few contributors that introduced a high volume of new photographic enthusiasts to photo.net. Many signed up and others just followed links I provided to recommended threads of interest. Needless to say, this site's attempt at copying the crowded field of predominantly photo displaying websites, has caused many of my business referral links & reviews to be trashed.

As a result I've stop pointing/linking folks in this 'messy' direction; not only has it turned unprofessional, but add to that a complete embarrassment...

..........yet another 24 hrs and I still can't remain logged in for more than a few minutes each session, nothing sticks, no images remain assigned to the their galleries, and profile information and site preferences/settings refuse to gel once re-set........... My former hidden gallery images are still devoid of all their images and thus my posts online with those imags are now just holes in cycberspace .......

C'mon p.net I want this to work out but it's now days and still nothing works as it should.

For me, the first attempt at a site update last year was an unmitigated disaster. However, the current attempt is quite promising in spite of the bugs.

I want to encourage you to continue ironing out the problems.

It is unfortunate that a number of members find change so unpleasant that they sometimes push the boudaries of civility and common sense. Surely, all of us should be able to patiently wait a few weeks to see if there is improvement. In the meantime, we can make bug reports in a detailed but restrained manner.

I'm wary that if we shout "revert" every time an attempt is made at a redesign, the effect will be that we'll be ignored, rather than the desired effect of people not messing with the site! I do think there's plenty that should have been caught before the new (new) site went public, and probably would have been if we'd had some warning and people had been involved in testing. Still, we're here now. Currently I'm calling for some information on how the fixes are going (the only indication I've seen of the development team fixing things so far is that the "edit" button has disappeared) so we can tell the rate at which the site is becoming usable and what's still to come; I really hope that a few weeks of solid work and feedback can get the site into a state which is basically functional. Yes, that should have happened before things went live, but at this point I assume a load of new posts aren't being mirrored to the old site, and therefore will go missing if a roll-back happens(?), so that would also be bad. I'll accept some pain while the rough edges get polished, but I'd really love (us all) to know how much people are actually polishing!

 

To be clear, the change is almost universally worse for me. A number of systems flatly don't work, usability is down (even allowing for unfamiliarity), and the only thing I see as a nice new feature is the ability to sort threads both by the latest post or (what I've been preferring) their origination. Kudos, that's mildly useful, although not worth breaking everything else for. But I'm choosing to assume that I'm atypical: I'd be perfectly happy with this site working solely as a usenet group, because I mostly inhabit the forums - and I actively prefer editing in raw HTML (I've not yet tried to work out what "BBCode" is, but I assume it's yet another markup language to learn, whereas I already know HTML!) Presuming this is about attracting new members, I'm happy to take a little pain in order for the site to be viable and be more inviting. But it would be much more easy to be sympathetic if there was a document somewhere describing all the new features, the way that old features were going to be implemented, and the goals of the redesign. I assume the development team had to show this to management in order to get funded for the project, so I'm hoping that this is a simple matter of posting it publicly. I'm trying to keep calm until something like this shows up. Fingers crossed.

We appreciate your words of encouragement, the documentation for this project was not written for public consumption - pages and page in Confluence, many, many sprints in JIRA, but also you can understand publishing something like that would make it easier for hackers to attack us so I can't imagine us or any developers publicly publish site blueprints unless they were willing to take an onslaught of hacker attacks because they released information they shouldn't have. Wish I could help more - but don't want you to pine for something that simply won't be published.

However, I will do my best to answer any questions you have if it is helpful. I do believe my time is best spent pulling feedback (and constructive criticism) from the help forum as this is the finger on the pulse of the community, rather than going through the last 2 years of this project - we launched and we'll continue to optimize.

What we're working on right now is mostly speed and page optimizations plus fine tuning functions like hidden folders among others. We believe the fix pushed for SSO (single sign on) should make things better - we've seen many that reported the issue say it has been resolved. If SSO is still and issue - please DM me your Browser and OS so we can attempt to recreate.

We can look into that - I am fairly sure it is

 

 

Must be a settings issue - we can look into the user name

People's identities here, especially those of us who have been here for over a decade, are rather central to how we recognize each other. Very strange that you guys would opt to strip away the names that people have chosen - for years straight - to display, and provide no way to edit that. What gives? That can't have been an oversight, so it's deliberate. Just don't understand the thinking.

People's identities here, especially those of us who have been here for over a decade, are rather central to how we recognize each other. Very strange that you guys would opt to strip away the names that people have chosen - for years straight - to display, and provide no way to edit that. What gives? That can't have been an oversight, so it's deliberate. Just don't understand the thinking.

Its on our list so expect to have it resolved however it is not as high on the list as some other bugs but I know we are tracking it. Creating a signature is something we could all use to bridge the gap until they fix it.

I'm sorry...

Don't like the new site....

the documentation for this project was not written for public consumption - pages and page in Confluence, many, many sprints in JIRA, but also you can understand publishing something like that would make it easier for hackers to attack us so I can't imagine us or any developers publicly publish site blueprints unless they were willing to take an onslaught of hacker attacks because they released information they shouldn't have. Wish I could help more - but don't want you to pine for something that simply won't be published.

 

However, I will do my best to answer any questions you have if it is helpful. I do believe my time is best spent pulling feedback (and constructive criticism) from the help forum as this is the finger on the pulse of the community, rather than going through the last 2 years of this project - we launched and we'll continue to optimize.

Okay, thanks for the response, Glenn. I still might have hoped that there would have been at least an early design document showing the goals and UI philosophy, prior to the actual implementation - and I do think anything like this (even if written retrospectively) would go some way to mollifying people like me who would sleep better if the benefits of the new site over the old were more obvious. Still, I appreciate that fixing the bugs on the new site is a higher priority than doing this, especially if it's a considerable effort and a security issue. Rather than asking questions individually, I'll shut up and leave you time to compile a FAQ/guide on your own time. Nonetheless, I do find it disappointing that at no point during the last two years was the membership apparently given input into the design. (I know there was a preview; I no longer have my details for it, and I'm told that feedback there wasn't entirely incorporated either, so I don't count this.) Nonetheless, we're past that point now, so us users will have to be working our way around the site until the bugs and a guide appear, and I'm afraid the developers may have to put up with some of us venting frustrations!

Incidentally, as I'm sure someone else will have commented by now, the underlying text in the reply box is now gone; thank you, that was annoying.