ADMIN: A personal perspective on the move of the LF Forum to photo.net

I've posted

at <a href =

"http://www.largeformatphotography.info/lf-photonet.html">http://www.largeformatphotography.info/lf-photonet.html</a>

my account of

the move of the LF Forum to photo.net. Please comment in this thread.

I, miss the old Lucenet forum. Don't like the sign with a secret password procedure on Photo.net. Seems like a lot fewer participants here. Where did the old gang go?

Tuan, thanks for that update. I've been reading both locations and mostly posting here because you suggested we do so for now. I'll follow the forum wherever you decide to move it, and support it financially if necessary, if it is structured as a not-for-profit. Since you've got a downloaded version of the archives, along with a trio of software volunteers, it might not be too difficult to notify everyone about a new url via email. Thanks for all your efforts.

Nearly everything I know about LF (which may not be all that much...) , I learned from this forum and its archives and experimenting with what I have found here. I do not feel that having the site housed under a commercial umbrella site is in the best interests of those who follow us. I would not be as forthcoming in that environment, and I believe others may be more reticent as well.

<BR><BR>

I'd be happy to add some financial support for the site if needed, and I would imagine many others would rather make a small contribution than to have the site moved to phot.net.<BR><BR>Cheers,

Richard

One poin t on the ownership of the posts that is mentioned. It would be my understanding that ownership (copyright) of a post remains solely with the poster?

 

BTW Tuan - if you find in the end you still need a server, I would go ahead and deal directly with Brian Reid as we discussed.

 

tim

Mr. Tuan Long, I feel you've dropped the baton, so to speak. Even before reading your post on the above link, I knew from present circumstances that it would say basically what you've been saying all along (between the lines), which is: "I like being the moderator, etc.,etc., but the work involved in developing our own site is too much for me. etc" This is basically how your present essay reads to me as well. Nothing has really changed from your standpoint. So unless one of the LF'ers with serious programming skills other than Brian steps up BIG TIME now, and someone/s willing to bulk out some seed money, we are going to stay here - believe me. So guys and gals, post your photos, your gear info and let's enjoy it here.

 

I admit, I miss seeing the names of the ol' regulars, and hope we can get the feel back with our "independent site", but that's DREAMING. Our best chance was months ago when you brought the issue up, and got all that positive support and willingness to send in money, help, etc. As our leader, you failed to give the appearance that you were genuinely open to help from us. Probably busy enjoying 5x7 photography. Don't blame ya! :>)

Tuan,

 

While I have been involved with LF for a number of years, I have only been a regular on the forum since late 2000. This knowledge base and resource of LF practioners has greatly increased my enjoyment of all formats I shoot, literally saved me thousands of dollars with advice and input and has helped me greatly advance my craft and creativity.

 

I would prefer to keep the premise of the old forum as you discussed in your post, a community of LF enthusiasts sharing knowledge and experience in a simple, straightforward interface. I don't really care for the sign in or the symbols denoting those who contribute services or money to photo.net.

 

So if the opportunity presents itself in the future to move to an independent server, I would support the move and be willing to make a small contribution to help it along.

PS, Quang, I too am ready to submit a check. Perhaps next time you post, you'll go a step further, and give us a mailing address where to send money. Please let us ALL know what is and what is not going on...

Dear Q.T.L.,

Something about this new site is a little stagnant...not a lot of LF energy there right now.....but maybe in time.Your present clarity and intellegence is appreaciated in this matter and I feel exactly as you do in relation to the current situation. Whatever you think is best,do it! You have my affirmation.

All the best!

I posted a question at night and I was it posted later in about 3 hours; then It was there for 24+_ hours and disapeared after only one answer........Maybe I need to understand a wee bit better how this site works; and/ or shoot a roll On the Noctilux & M3 to clear the brain's cobwebs....regards to all Kelly

Hi Tuan

 

I now understand why I could not find the page for a while. I would give photo.net a chance. If we see it gets to much other traffic we still can change and move to a other solution.

The most negativ point till now for me is the slowing down of the service. The former solution was faster.

And a important point for me is that we not get all that 35mm staff in that forum.

I can live with thad solution.

We'll just have to see how it goes. Meanwhile, I would just like to express my thanks to you for the work you have done and for your tremendous contribution to LF.

Ow, Andre, I think you're being WAY too harsh and unfair to QTL. Your

interpretation seems like a misreading of his intent, but I'll let him

respond as appropriate.

 

Kelly Flanigan, the photo.net forums are all listed in the gray bar

above under "Community" > "Forums." If you post to the "General

(Archived)" forum, 99 out of 100 times the moderators will decide that

for whatever reason the question need not be archived for the ages and

will bump it to the "General (Not Archived)" forum, where all posts

expire within a day or three.

 

If you want your post to survive, post it somewhere other than either

of the "General" forums; the Leica forum and this Large format forum,

for example, archive ALL questions and answers.

Kelly, probably you posted not to this forum but to the Archived forum. In that particular forum, the policy of the moderator is to screen all the posts and decide which ones go to the Archived forum. The rest are zapped to the Unarchived Forum, where they stay for a day or two before being automatically deleted.

 

That is just the "General" forums and it is because they have so much traffic. The other forums, including this one, work the same way as on LUSENET: the post goes in immediately, and the moderator can delete it if he feels that is appropriate.

Another somewhat off-topic point. Armin, regarding speed, if you turn off the Javascript-based pull down menus (which unfortunately are turned on by default if your browswer supports them), it will be a *LOT* faster to display the forums. To do this, go to "My workspace" and click the "Turn pull-down menus on or off". This will bring you to page where you can turn them off.

If, as you suggest, the solution in the works will work on any vanilla ISP server, your-site.com might be a good solution. I use them for my hosting, and the basic service with 50megs of space includes a cgi-bin and runs for $5/month. Assuming 50 megs is enough and it can support the software we need to use, it would prove to be an easier solution to pay for than one of the $20/month providers. Surely the users collectively can cough up just $60 a year to keep the site running...

Many kudos to Q.-Tuan Luong for getting the forum set up in the first place. Must have been a big job. I agree with the non-profit idea. I don't mind the move here, but I applaud the search for other options. I hope other folks begin to contribute here in the meantime.

 

Chris Jordan (the Boston one)

 

www.jordanphoto.com

Erik, you'll need a site that supports more efficient scripting than CGI and access to a database capable of supporting the nearly 60000 messages in the LF archives. You'll also need the ability to generate emails from the system, assuming that you want to keep email notifications. Don't forget bandwidth charges. The $5.00 per month at a place like your-site.com provides very minimal bandwith, suitable for your personal home page with (not too many) baby pictures for your relatives.

 

Just for comparison, photo.net consists of two front end boxes running web servers, a big back end box running Oracle, a load balancer, a firewall, and lots of RAID storage arrays. The ISP colocation and bandwidth charges for all this come to over $100,000 per year, not to mention the depreciation, etc, on the hardware. Of course, you don't need all of this because LF is just one forum. But you shouldn't underestimate the costs.

 

The photo.net revenue, which consists of $25 per year from a few hundred members who have become "patrons", plus sponsorship from companies like Adorama, covers these costs, but with not a lot of room to spare. There are currently no paid employees; the site is run by many volunteers, who generously donate their time. If you move to another site, it is either going to be commercial like photo.net, only probably a *LOT* more so, or someone is going to have to pay for it, and probably more than you all imagine.

 

Speaking of volunteers, I wish the people who are beavering away on the an alternative bulletin board system would consider volunteering to make the LF forum better here at photo.net. We have many programming opportunities for volunteers.

 

I'd like to hear some input from people about what they'd like to see in order to be happy at photo.net. I guess some people are never going to like it because it is run by (yikes) a for-profit corporation. But apart from that, what do people want to see here (or not see here)?

 

So far I've heard three specific problems mentioned in this thread: (a) I don't like the little icons next to (other) people's names; (b) I don't like having to log in; © I don't like the moderation policy and/or the postings in some of the *other* forums.

Photo.net's not such a bad place. I'm quite active there.

 

The non-profit, text-oriented, no-advertising, LUSENET forum, however, was a better place, with less ambiguity about the ownership of content, so I'd prefer that kind of environment.

 

What would make photo.net better? Well, for starters, how about revising the copyright notice and implementing the technology to allow contributors to pull all their content at will.

LUSENET didn't give you the ability to pull all your content at will.

 

I don't actually agree with being able to do that. I'd like to make it easy to delete all of your photos at will, even though you may be taking insightful comments with them.

 

However, when you make a discussion forum posting or a comment on someone else's photo, it becomes part of the thread, and other people are going to base their comments on points that have been previously made. Allowing people to delete their bulletin board postings would make a hash of the discussions. Even moderator's deletion of comments can do this, and that is one reason that being a moderator can be difficult.

 

Your suggestion would also allow troublemakers to post an inflammatory comment, watch all the outraged reactions, and then delete the original comment leaving behind the wreckage of the discussion. The moderator would be left to clean it all up and might not get there in time even to see who posted the troublesome post.

 

This is the primary reason why the photo.net Terms of Use say that photo.net is granted a non-exclusive but perpertual right to publish comments.

 

When people voluntarily post a comment into a discussion they should realize that it is potentially going to be available in the archives indefinitely (as it was on LUSENET), unless the forum policy states differently.

One other small point. LUSENET was actually a lot more ambiguous than photo.net about the status of the content. Nothing was specified about it on LUSENET, anywhere that I can find.

 

You would have to research case law to know the status of your posts there, and I suspect that there aren't cases on a lot of the points.

 

Were contributors putting their posts into the public domain? Did the copyright belong to Philip Greenspun because he ran the server? Did the copyright belong to Tuan because he established the forum, linked to it from his site, and moderated it? What did the terms of use posted on Tuan's site have to do, if anything, with the status of the posts on greenspun.com? If they did have any relevance, did they apply differently to people who came to the forum through his link, through a search engine, or through the LUSENET home page? Did the copyright status of the postings change if you didn't use your real or name and email address, but rather a pseudonym or partial name, or a false email address? What usage rights were granted to Philip Greenspun? To Tuan, the forum moderator? To anyone else?

 

The situation on LUSENET was incredibly more ambiguous than here.

I have only been interested in LF for a few months and so have only been following the forum for that long, but the archives have been an enormously important part of my self education in this area, so I figure I have a vested interest, so here goes...

 

Brian,

No one (at least not many :)) are suggesting photo.net is hell-on-earth. For my own part, I appreciate its non-invasive advertising and some of its other useful features (having to log-in is however, *not* one of them...). However, as a commercial project there are noteworthy issues concerning privacy and copyright. Your privacy terms contain such gems as:

 

"We may share User Information with our partners, affiliates and joint venturers that are committed to serving your need for the Services and improving your user experience"

 

Come On! That is one of the sleaziest "we reserve the right to sell your email address to spammers FOR YOUR OWN BENEFIT!" conditions I have ever read. Now, I accept what you have written elsewhere, that you have never divulged email addresses and that you intend to change your policy soon - such terms being the result of over zealous lawyers, but really, how long does it take to type "We will never divulge any personal information you give us, to anyone, anytime"?

 

Now, one other thing that has ruffled a few feathers is the way the switch to photo.net was done - while Quang-Tuan Luong was out of touch.... My understanding is that this forum was instigated by QTL and hosted on Philip Greenspun's server. At this point I think it should be said that the users of the forum owe a large round of thanks to Mr Greenspun for hosting the forum for so long. Mr Greenspun clearly has a perfect right to decide which, if any, forums he wishes to run on his server for whatever reason he may have and no one can complain if he no longer wishes to do so with this forum. However (there's that word again ;)) neither Mr Greenspun, nor photo.net OWN this forum and as such moving it elsewhere without the express OK from the community was a very dodgy action. To the extent that anyone can be said to own it, that honour lies with QTL as originator (although from his postings it is obvious that he considers it to belong to the LF community at large).

 

There are other issues concerning copyright of content for example but this message is already too long...

 

I think you really have to decide what photo.net is: is it a commercial operation or a non-commercial one? It has all the hallmarks of a non-commercial site (no profit to speak of, run by volunteers, low advertising footprint, good communications with users etc) but is an incorporated company which could, for example, be sold to others with a very different ethos to the current management.

 

To summarise my view: the switch over was *very* badly handled from a human point of view (technically it was pretty painless from the user's viewpoint). Privacy remains an issue. Photo.net is not at all bad - very good in fact - but a non-commercial site, or a major review of photo.net's legal position would be better. However (last one) it may be that the benefits of photo.net outweigh the downsides - it will, in any event, be up to the community here to decide long-term.

 

Sorry this is so long... Cheers,

Is there any way that the good folks at photo.net could provide a seperate set of html files that are as handheld-friendly as the old forum? All of the html junk at the top of the page now is somewhat annoying. I assume that this would be simple enough, as everything is generated.

Brian, You say

 

"Were contributors putting their posts into the public domain? Did the copyright belong to Philip Greenspun because he ran the server? Did the copyright belong to Tuan because he established the forum, linked to it from his site, and moderated it? What did the terms of use posted on Tuan's site have to do, if anything, with the status of the posts on greenspun.com? If they did have any relevance, did they apply differently to people who came to the forum through his link, through a search engine, or through the LUSENET home page? Did the copyright status of the postings change if you didn't use your real or name and email address, but rather a pseudonym or partial name, or a false email address? What usage rights were granted to Philip Greenspun? To Tuan, the forum moderator? To anyone else?"

 

Quite simple in most cases. ONLY the copyright holder can grant any of those rights. Just because something is placed in public (public domian is a technical term and missleading - none of this material is "Public Domain") doesn't mean someone else can somehow share copyright in that thing. The copyright status can not change unless the owner says so.

 

tim

Bob, I agree with you on the privacy statement. A lot of people feel the way you do. All the staff at photo.net feel that way (unless they don't care at all.) It is an example of letting the lawyers "reserve" everything they think they can get away with. In fact, photo.net doesn't "share" any information with partners and won't. I think there have been two promotions with partners where users were asked to fill in a form to get some free stuff and the form included an email address, and it was clear that the address was going to be sent to the partner. However, we have never sent the email address that is associated with anyone's photo.net account to a partner, and we aren't going to. The privacy policy will eventually be changed to reflect our actual policy and not what some lawyer thinks we ought to "reserve".

 

As for the rest of your comments, Philip Greenspun apparently thought he was within his rights (and that it was his responsibility) to prevent the demise of the forum by moving it here. As a volunteer for photo.net, I was willing to do the work (which for all the forums was a week of long days) because I thought they would be a big asset to photo.net and because about 40% of the contributors were photo.net members already, possibly more considering all of the false and misspelled email addresses. As I've said elsewhere, the legal situation with LUSENET is so clouded that I don't know for sure that Philip had the right to do this. But if he didn't I don't think anyone else does either.

 

As a practical matter, notwithstanding what our said above about making hash of discussions, if anyone insists on their pre-photo.net forum content being deleted, and can demonstrate that they posted it, we will delete it, since we don't want to be in the position of hosting content over the objections of its original author when the legal status of the content is so clouded.