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State of Relaunch, State of Mind


Sandy Vongries

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Again, my 2 cts as an ex-IT'er and as a voluntary moderator and manager of websits, forums and platform migrations. Website/Forum version upgrades (on the same 'platorm') are often challenging in terms of (user)functional and technical changes.

Migrating a website/forum from one 'platform' to another is a wholly more greater challenge. Just consider the challenge of migrating all user accounts (user names, passwords, profile), forum categories and messages to a completely different (technical) 'platform'. And the ongoing task of migrating hundreds of thousands of 'images' and relating these to the authors.

The new PN 'test site' was evaluated by various PN members who gave their feedback. The 'migratration strategy' was clearly outlined on the 'old site' well in advance. If you missed it, you weren't IMHO paying attention.

IMHO, the new owners/developers/moderators of PN have done an excellent job in making the migratiion from the 'old' PN to the 'new' PN as seamless as possible. Sure there are still some tweaks to be made. The 'porting' of the vast number of images from the 'old' site to the 'new site' is still in progress.

But all in all. I believe that the new owners/developers/moderators have done a wonderful job. Occasional 'glitches' are solved quickly, which leads me to believe that the new PN website has great support

I echo @samstevens's sentiments in asking members to just keep calm, have some patience and have faith that the remaining issues will be resolved soon. One great benefit from the new site is that if you have an issue, you can report it and someone will quickly respond to it,

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I echo what Mike has said, so I can be added to the "Brown Nose Brigade" as well...  💩

As a longtime developer, publisher, and administrator of numerous fora using SMF, vBulletin, Xenforo, and WPForo, I can empathize with our new admin, @mjensen.  It is quite likely that he is the primary mover and shaker of this new enterprise--and has nearly 30 years of accumulated 'stuff' to deal with and to port over into a user friendly gallery/portfolio system.

Pretty much all forum platforms are incredibly granular in permissions--meaning that both global and user group permissions must be set individually.  What is not native to the platform can often be extended via apps or plugins--but those cost still more money to the publisher.  

There has been a steady movement to move things from the default settings.  Yes, security has some holes.  I see that some of those are being fixed.  @normanskiromanoff, if you have ever stood up a site pretty much by yourself, you would understand.

Or we could have watched this place get shut down.

I favor the former alternative, and am willing to give our new galactic overlords time to move through things.  

For laughs, I created a "trial" installation of Invision Community--and have been playing about in the Admin Control Panel interface.  As noted, everything is granular--and it is possible to filter the activity results by type as they appear to users.  Time and budget.  And there likely is not a lot of the latter.

Personally, I would like to welcome back a number of PN friends who have not been visiting--or are sandbagging--back into activity.  To them I would say that things are hardly perfect, but they are indeed moving along and we have been given another chance at digital life.

So let's chill, have fun with what we have--and enjoy the ride! 

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7 hours ago, normanskiromanoff said:

What are you on?It’s full of spam and every fart by TD&H is published

29E3A21C-9545-4F24-B095-073BEA7DEA51.png

What am I on, eh?
Well… since we’re being blunt, 

I’m NOT *ON* the “cranky old git” plan.

I AM ON the “scroll around the site, talk to people, and post pix” plan.

I stay strictly on (or near) the surface and it’s completely painless. I am 100% able to do whatever I want here with zero problems- something I couldn’t have said a few days ago.

I don’t go hunting for problems with the site, and I don’t find any - and, surprise surprise- none present themselves to me. 

Maybe you should back it down a little and just roll with it. I mean unless you’re obsessed with how lousy the site is and determined not to get over it. You could even try posting some photos or something, if you really wanted to go hog wild. Shocking concept, I know. 
 

Any other questions? 

 

 

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I must give credit where credit is due.

After a rocky start , I think that Matt Jensen and his Team are doing a good job , things can only improve , give them a little more time.

Remember Folks , we still HAVE Photo.net , which might not have been the case otherwise.

 

 

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21 hours ago, normanskiromanoff said:

I’ve done migrations from national carriers, BT, British Gas, Orange, French Telecom  not some wanky ham radio set up  

 

I know about migrating systems 

Having said that, who really gives a shit  

 

Well, Master Of The Internet, figure it out, for a guy who doesn’t give a shit you sure cry a lot. 

3 hours ago, normanskiromanoff said:

I quoted the front page, no need to hunt. 

when I open “photo.net” here’s the “front page” I get. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

989C7FEF-F17E-4A17-A98B-AB509398CE53.jpeg

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22 hours ago, normanskiromanoff said:

I’ve done migrations from national carriers, BT, British Gas, Orange, French Telecom  not some wanky ham radio set up  

Given that, you should know then what happens with a big budget.  We don't have that going for us.  

At least the the Ignore feature is working seamlessly here...  🥸

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1 minute ago, peter.s said:

There's a blackhole playing roulette with our own photos.

There's an ongoing platform/software migration taking place and galleries, data intensive as they are, take longer to migrate. That's what we were told and that's what's happening.

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"You talkin' to me?"

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On 10/11/2022 at 9:54 AM, PapaTango said:

You must not have been paying attention.  This ride started with an announcement of new ownership many months ago.

 

True, I don't pay a lot of attention. Then again, I saw your note and replied in 4 days. So what does that say about communications, search engine problems, missing galleries, galleries going up and down like yo-yos etc? Would PN have been better migrated had I paid attention or is that a red herring? My verdict remains: amateur migration, cheered on by Polyannas saying "don't worry, be happy." Truth is I'm not worried. There are plenty of other sites. I enjoyed Photo.Net and some very talented photographers who used to be here. If PN eventually get it right (and I pay attention), I'll see if it's worth the time again. Meanwhile thanks for my 1-year badge in celebration for my being here since 2001 🙂

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Old software is a often a problem as time passes.  Code errors that were unimportant suddenly become critical, at great expense in time and effort to repair.  This update is a good faith and genuine effort.  A little patience and respect for the good work done and better to come wouldn't hurt.  Patience is a virtue, apparently in short supply.  You might give company personnel a break. and an compliment now and then, for work to date.  (Note: I am a volunteer!)

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13 hours ago, httpwww.photo.netbarry said:

No it wouldn't. But at least you would have known what was happening.

Well communications was just one of my criticisms, but now you've made me curious. PN has my email address. I also have a PN "notifications" icon and a PN mail inbox. Any/all of these would seem like reasonable places for PN to notify users about pending changes. I didn't see info in any of these, although I do pay attention to these. So how were the communications made? 

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I have been looking at the old forum posts. The ability to find old discussions of an obscure camera is one of the things I value most about photo.net. I've even cited forum posts here in wiki pages at camera-wiki.

Old forum posts can now be browsed a long way back: For example, the Medium Format forum runs to 1600 pages of 25 threads each, and the earliest post is from March 1997. I find I can embed it by pasting the url here!

 

 

(Aside: Curiously, the title of that post is 'Follow up re: ...' so it's not the earliest post about MF on photo.net; refers to an earlier post on a thing called MFD (maybe Medium Format Discussions?) Vol 7 #1 - maybe an earlier thread-format that couldn't be rescued when the rejigged the structure sometime around '93? La plus ça change...

Also curiously, while was reading that post, a notification appeared at the bottom, of four new replies to it! There weren't really; the existing replies just registered as new, I guess.)


Anyhow, you can browse that far back, but search seems to go back exactly two years at the moment. I'm confident this is a setting that can be re-set to search all time. I hope so.

For example if I search for 'Ikon' (as in Zeiss Ikon) with the scope set to 'Topics' at the right of the search box, I get nine pages of results, and the earliest one is in October 2020. But if I search for 'Agifold' I get no results at all. There are posts on that camera - I posted some of them myself - but they're more than two years old.

 

Thanks again to the people doing the migration!

Edited by Dustin McAmera
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Well, things are looking up - well done all. May not have been instantaneous, but very few good things are. I can now post images, and award likes to the images others have posted. Be nice if my name could revert to Tony Parsons, but that is an extremely minor issue that may or may not be dealt with in the fulness of time - who knows ?

Tony

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3 minutes ago, tony_parsons1 said:

Well, things are looking up - well done all. May not have been instantaneous, but very few good things are. I can now post images, and award likes to the images others have posted. Be nice if my name could revert to Tony Parsons, but that is an extremely minor issue that may or may not be dealt with in the fulness of time - who knows ?

Tony

Have you tried going to My Account / Account Settings / Display Name?  It might be working!

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Many thing seem to be happening under the radar!  We are now able to set the background banner in profiles; Likes (aka Reactions) are now unlimited; and I believe the PM system has been fixed to allow more than two conversations before being forced to delete them to start a new one.

The fine tuning is underway!

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 "I See Things..."

The FotoFora Community Experience [Link]

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