Goings On at Photo.net - the news

[bobatkins]

As some may be aware, Photo.net has been going though some changes since last

summer when Brian Mottershead left and Philip Greenspun took over the site. We

now have a significant amount of new hardware installed and we are on the

brink of installing what you might call a new version of the "site operating

system" on the servers. It's not really the operating system (which is some

flavor of UNIX), but it's the basic software that runs the site (for the

technically inclined it's the ArsDigita Community System).

 

There might be a few glitches during the transition but hopefully these

changes will make the site both faster and more stable, as well as making life

easier for the programmers to add new features.

 

A number of older articles have been revised and new ones written and when the

new software is brought on line you'll be able to read the new content. It's

all in beta test right now, but the system seems to be pretty stable. Once

everything is made live we'll start adding new articles and equipment reviews.

 

Bring you up to date on this forum, you may have missed that Mark U. joined me

as a moderator here, but now you know! If you have any question about the

forum, you can contact either me or Mark.

 

For those new to the forum and the site, the forum rules can be found in the

rightmost column of the forum index page (http://www.photo.net/bboard/forum?topic_id=1545) and the site rules can be found on the Terms of Use page

(http://www.photo.net/terms-of-use). Everyone should read them if they haven't

yet done so.

 

If you want to know more about the site and what's going on, please read

the "Letter from the Editor" which Philip has posted at

http://www.photo.net/from-the-editor/200701

 

We also have a new "About Us" page at http://www.photo.net/about-us which will

give you some idea of who does what around here!

 

Bob Atkins - Photo.net Technical Editor - EOS Forum moderator

[les]

Hopefully there will be no changes to the user interface. Changing the looks/menus/location of buttons appears to be a favorite pastime of software/website designers.

 

The worst enemy of the good is the (supposedly) better - I for one vote for familiarity and contents, could not care less for changes to graphics (I know this is not the case here, so stay calm :D )

 

Hope all will proceed smoothly and w/o the usual glitches.

[mars c]

How will that affect the old archived threads, will they still be accessible for future reference? Or will the archived threads be deleted?

[fourfa]

thanks for the update

[john_davids]

The graphics need updating. They should all be animated--when you click on a word button (for exmaple the "forum" button above), there should be an aperture (8 bladed for better bokeh, of course) in the letter "O"--and any other letter with a circular opening--that graphically "stops down", and a shutter noise. (later versions could even have the screen go blank to simulate the shutter, and then have the page slowly "develop", simulating a poloroid--only on film related pages however)

 

In fact, the fonts should be retooled to maximize the number of circular openings, in letters such as "P" "g", etc.

 

This effect is NOT a cliche in photography-related logos and websites, and we REALLY should use it!

[jim_larson1]

I would be happy if we got 2001 era forum software. . .

 

. . .as opposed to this 1995 dinosaur the forum runs on.

[William Michael]

I assume that much at photonet is done behind the scenes out of love, not remuneration, and it is nice to get `Thank you.`

 

So: Thank you

 

Cheers

 

WW

[bobatkins]

Little will change. Take a look at http://www.photo.net/about-us to see what the pages will eventually look like. Pretty much the same layout and page design, but hopefully they look a little better and are easier to read.

 

The forums will look pretty much as they do now, with some pretty minor layout changes. The archives will remain intact. Everything that's accessible now will be accessible after the upgrade.

 

The cosmetic part of the upgrade is just the "icing on the cake" - though that's quite important since making the site easier to use is a primary goal. The changes are in the hardware and software that the site runs on are probably the most important from the site's point of view but they will be pretty much invisible to users.

[tom moore]

Bob thanks to you and all of the others who keep this site running. My only request is a better forum interface the current one is circa 1996. Even good posts die quickly because they are bumped down the list and a a user cannot easily see active posts versus ones that are dead.

[bobatkins]

That's what the "New Answers" link is for (and how I found your post here!).

 

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a?topic_id=1545&type=new_answers

 

I don't know what changes are planned for the fourm, but I don't think there will be huge changes, maybe some small improvements though.

[fourfa]

"new answers" is not completely without flaw, as there's a "last visit" cookie that gets set globally for the whole site, not specific to each forum. no "new answers" threads are shown past that "last visit" date, which means often going into the browser preferences to hunt down and delete that stupid cookie...