services_photonet Posted May 11, 2002 Share Posted May 11, 2002 <p>We are pleased to announce a number of improvements to the <ahref="/bboard/forum?topic_id=1481">PhotoCritique Forum</a>. The purpose of these changes is to make iteasier to submit a photograph for critique and also to facilitateresponding to those requests. <ol><li>The first thing that you will notice is that the presentation ofthe forum has been changed. Thumbnails for recent requests arepresented, as before, but the list of photo categories, which waspreviously hidden at the end of the long list of requests, are nowgiven prominence in a list of links to the right. <li>Clicking on any of the categories, or on "Last 7 Days", will takeyou to the Photocritique user interface, which will be familiar tothose users who have tried the "Rate recent photos" and "Rate folder"features. This interface streamlines the process of rating andcritiquing many photos during a short session. The photos presentedare those in the category for which members have requested critiquesduring the last 30 days. <li>When the Photocritique interface is used for responding toCritique Requests, the photos with the highest <em>number</em> ofratings are presented first, and if two photos havethe same number of ratings, the one with the <em>higher rating</em>takes precedence. However, once a photo has 20 ratings, it drops tothe end of the list. This means that the most frequently-rated andhigher-rated photos work their way to the front of the list, untilthey have 20 ratings, whereupon they give way to photos with fewerratings. The "Last 7 Days" photos work the same way, except that thelist consists of all photos for which critiques have been requested,without regard to the categories, and only the last 7 days of requestsare included. <li>The "Rate recent photos" feature, which also uses thePhotocritique interface, has not been changed. It still presentsan editor's selections from one day's worth of photo submissions. Theorder is random, more or less, although patron's photos get anadvantage in the order of the photos. <li>In the Critique Requests forum, you can still see a list of allthe requests, with their titles and the name of the photographer, byclicking the "List" link next to the category or "Last 7 Days". <li>When you display a photo for which a critique request has beenmade, the text of the request is displayed as the first "comment" inthe photo. The critique request message is displayed even when youhave navigated to the forum from somewhere else in the Gallery. Thisis helpful sometimes in understanding comments on the photo whichrefer to the photographer's critique request. <li>You can still submit a photo for critique from the Critique Forum;but you can also make a critique request from your "Workspace" page orfrom the Photo page for a particular photo. These links are disabledif you have exhausted your quota of critique requests. (The quotashave not changed.) </ol> <p>We hope that these changes will make it easier to request and makecritiques, and we invite your feedback. <p><em>-- for Services Photonet, Brian Mottershead</em> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris_hawkins Posted May 11, 2002 Share Posted May 11, 2002 Thank you for all your work and I look forward to participating in the photo critique forum. I enourage my fellow netizens to give it a chance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alan_krantz Posted May 11, 2002 Share Posted May 11, 2002 One question -- would it not be er helpful to put those with the fewest critique/ratings first -- else won't the ones that get rated first always get the attention and the others will be ignored ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted May 11, 2002 Share Posted May 11, 2002 Alan, the reason the photos with the highest number of ratings are first is that we wanted to make it attractive to rate and critique photos as well as to submit photos for critique. We would like the critiquers to have a rewarding experience so that they will come back frequently to rate and critique photos. This suggests that the first photos to be presented should be the better ones, so that the critiquers are drawn in and rate more photos. Hopefully, excellent photos will rapidly get their twenty ratings and drop to the bottom of the list, letting other photos take their place. Some photos may take longer to rise than others, but each photo is in the list for 30 days. During the time we were testing this interface, I was delighted to discover how many great photos there are to be critiqued in the Photo Critique Forum. They were somewhat buried. Now, they come up right away. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
greglyon Posted May 11, 2002 Share Posted May 11, 2002 I have only browsed through a few photos since the changes, but I really like them so far. The algorithm of best with less than 20 ratings sounds right on to me. One other request - would it be possible to see the photographer's request/comment on the photocritique page? There is frequently good insight into why the photo is up for critique at all, yet it is missed unless you actually click into the detail. Thanks for all the improvements! Greg Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted May 11, 2002 Share Posted May 11, 2002 Greg, that is a good suggestion. There has been some discussion about tightening up the graphical "look" of that page, and perhaps we can fit in the critique request text. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
greglyon Posted May 11, 2002 Share Posted May 11, 2002 Not sure if this is the best place to comment, but the "You've already rated and commented on this picture" page has a broken link for the "click here if you want to move on to the next photo to rate." choice. Once again, thanks for the effort. Greg Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted May 11, 2002 Share Posted May 11, 2002 Greg, thanks for the bug report. It sounds related to the changes that were made today. I'll fix it right now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted May 11, 2002 Share Posted May 11, 2002 Greg, the problem is fixed. Thanks again for reporting it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paulfisher Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 I can't get the new system to work at all. There are no thumbnails, and clicking on any entry in the list of "questions" brings up an error message asking for a photo_id. Is this a bug, a temporary maintenance outage, or a case of dyslexic user? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
justthings Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 I like the changes you've made - any chance theres room for other changes? Here are 2 I'd like to see: 1) When you go to the 'add comment' page it'd be very cool if the image came up alongside or above the dialogue boxes so you can refer back to the image for making specific points; as it sits now, I can do that by hitting my browsers 'back' and 'forward' keys to move between the two, but if a thumbnail was integrated, that'd make the process much easier. 2) For the list versions of the photos (by category), is there anyway for PN to give us a set number (say 50 items) with a 'next 50' option rather than the entire list of photos for the whole category? Minor niggles really, but fixing these would go a long way to making this system really user friendly (in my opinion of course). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vonsh Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 It is a major improvement.<br> Some suggestions: I think it would be nice if there was an option to see a page of random thumbnails of the pictures. Some times just seeing an image makes you what to comment on it.<br> This is a bit tricky: if you could mark people from the users "interest list" in a different color or maybe change their bgcolor it would make the concept of the �interest list� much more powerful.<br> <br> Thanks again - vonsh Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paulfisher Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 <i>I can't get the new system to work at all</i> Actually, what I should have said is that the link from the home pagegoves erronoeus results. The link from this page is OK. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
david yama Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 Many thanks for all your efforts. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmj Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 Brian, first of all thanks for the time and effort to improve this forum! <p> <i>You can still submit a photo for critique from the Critique Forum; but you can also make a critique request from your "Workspace" page or from the Photo page for a particular photo. </i> <p> The link from the "Photo page for a particular photo" does not seem to work. It links to <tt>http://www.photo.net/bboard/pc-post-new-pc-1?topic_id=1481&photo_id=748231</tt>, which results in a 404/not found. (The photo_id is obviously just an example). I think that should be <tt>http://www.photo.net/bboard/pc-post-new-1?topic_id=1481&photo_id=748231</tt>. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmj Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 A suggestion as well: if a photographer has uploaded quite a few photos to photo.net, but not requested many critiques, the first page of the request critique pipeline will contain many images. This may cause a long delay (especially for modem users) and possibly a high load on the photo.net server. Maybe it's a good idea to have the photo selection go via listing the photographer's folders (and their contents if he/she clicks on one -- just like using the "manage your portfolio" links) and only offer the complete list of images-available-for-critique as an option? Obviously, if you want a specific image critiqued, you can now do so on its display-page, but this may be helpful nonetheless. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 Paul, there are actually two different problems. The "Critique" links on the home page were not updated for the new critique format; they should have been but the page is somehow locked and I can't change it; so the changes didn't go in. As a result, if you click on that link, you are seeing the Photo Critique forum presented as a straight "Question and Answer" Forum, which doesn't know how to present the photos correctly. If the home page link were working, this wouldn't be an issue. However, I've fixed that, and I hope later today we can get the home page updated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 Patrick, the problem with the link on the Photo page is now fixed; thanks for reporting it. Your point out a valid concern about the first stage of submitting a request: it will put quite a load on the server and result in somehat of a delay if the user has a lot of photos. Perhaps we can improve this on the next pass. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 Paul, I think the problem on the home page is now fixed. It was just a question of being persistent and catching it when the server was not serving it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paulfisher Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 Brian (and others): thanks for the big improvement - your efforts are appreciated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 Christopher, over the next two months (before I go on vacation), I'm hoping to be able to implement as many improvements as I can, and which the community agrees would be good. I'll be starting a thread soon to solicit inputs, although this thread wouldn't be a bad place to start the wish list. As an extra bonus improvement, check out "Add a comment" on a photo. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alan_krantz Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 I'm confused -- I tried the submit photo for critique from workshop and it failed with link being bad -- was this not fixed or is it another problem or ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 Alan, if you mean Workspace, the link seems fine. Perhaps you need to refresh the page in the browser. The link should be .../bboard/pc-post-new/topic_id=1481 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
philippe Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 <p>Hi Brian and all the others behind, <p> First of all thanks a lot for your work!! <p> I have one more suggestion: There seem to be a lot of images in the category architecture, that should not be there. I think this is due to the fact that the default setting when submitting an image for critique is 'architecture'. I would propose to change the default to 'uncategorized'. <p> Another thing I observed was, that when I tried to submit an image via the link on the images page itself, the URL was: <br> http://www.photo.net/bboard/pc-post-new%20-1?topic_id=1481&photo_id=612600 <br> note the %20 in there: It comes from a space in the link source code, probably caused by a little mistake in a script. Anyway, from the image page, I had to correct the URL manually to get to the submission page (Is at least the case for 2 of my images I checked). <p> Otherwise, thanks again. I think the changes are great. <p> Philippe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted May 12, 2002 Share Posted May 12, 2002 Philippe, I implemented your suggestion. There is now an "Uncategorized" category, which is the default. It is currently empty so clicking on it isn't very satisfying. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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