The Ghost Of Phils Society

Yes, it appears there was an issue. It has been dealt with.

Let me see if I have this right. You have purportedly been a member of PN since 2018. You have a total of 3 posts in the intervening time--all of them in this thread. You have never posted an image to PN. I am not going to discuss your previous user name, but I wish to thank you for bringing a security risk to light in terms of disallowed usernames. This has been addressed. Three administrators have now posted to this thread--all of us stating the same thing. PN has not been 'hacked.' The member database has not been sold to devious Indian spam factories. Thanks to those who posted constructive comments. I believe that we have a nice handle on the flow of incoming spam now. Keep a sharp eye, as a random bit might float in now and then. And with that this thread has run its useful course.

Many thanks to @William Michael for bringing clarity to this question. Numerous things have to be done on a regular basis in the background. Refreshing caches, sending bulk groups of emails and notices, so on and so forth. Some work every 5 minutes, some weekly or monthly. These are called 'cron jobs' where a cron rule triggers the platform to act. I believe that the cron for emptying trash is on a 1 hour trigger. So there will be a window from a user's action until the cron action in which trash is permanently deleted.

There is very little in the customs and usage of PN categories that is either interesting or remotely useful to outside observers, or intriguing to potential new members. Our site performance metrics demonstrate all of this per forum board as irrefutable fact. Rather it is obvious that many of our formerly technical boards have evolved into distinct "clubs" and the locus of photo posting threads, such as in this board "Nikon Wednesday." This has been an organic evolution; one compounded by the loss of all the previous photo posting opportunities on PN prior to 2016. And yes, such mass depositing of information has been going on for a very long time. Casual review shows that PG's lackadaisical approach to things 'back in the day' formed the sui generis of what has now become cemented reality. I know this not as a casual observer, or an "outside trendy re-formulator" bereft of experience with PN or any other photographic venue. Rather, I have 20+ years of observation here at PN, and similar experience in forums ranging from L-Serve/UseNet, APUG/Photrio, FredMiranda, Nikonians, DPReview and others. This gives me a pretty solid idea of what is common, what is passing away, and what works and what does not. The similarities in a number of boards at PN--in contrast to the old UseNet/Newsgroup is profound. One basket for everything. Well kids, the 90s are long past, and other boomers are not rushing up to restore our former glory or pay an entry fee. Recently I solicited suggestions from select members who had expressed opinions about the initial changes back in January. I will mention @ilkka_nissila as one of them, solely because he has participated in this thread. Guess how many responded? And yes, admins can tell if a PM has been read or not. All read and no one bothered to respond would be the answer. We acted on @Mary Doo 's request this morning by removing the 'assisted' qualifier. Guess what? An assisted film camera is defined by its ability to translate information delivered by the light metering system to the shutter and lens iris. Let's let it go, as that was part of a early visionary attempt to make PN a bit more granular and relevant. No reason we should want to do that? Now, why would a site want to do that? Let's ignore the fact that PN is exists as a village of about 1K regular participating members. Or that our resources now, however flawed are completely free? Or that sometime in the future this platform will radically be transformed into another format that can be marketable and generate supportive revenue? A potpourri basket is a nice present. It certainly does not make for a viable economic enterprise. So, for even as much fun and humor has been shared here--this thread does nothing to advance the perceptions or attraction of PhotoNet. If members wish to submit constructive comments, please PM either @Sandy Vongries or myself and we will relate it to senior management at Fiverr. Let's be part of the solution!

Are you wanting that just for yourself, or speaking globally across the site? At the request of many members, that feature was turned off back in January. Then at the request of many members, it was turned back on a week later. One can review the discussions on that in other threads. It is easy to disable that feature. It does not however remove the ability of anyone to right-click on an image and do the same thing.

Yes, PN has spent 30 years organically growing a board tree that defies order & categorical hierarchy. Technical boards are a potporri of text posts and image contests--often the latter overwhelming the original, intended purpose of the particular board. Much of this emerged due to previous forum platform migrations which eliminated the feature rich image posting areas of the past. The few attempts to relabel or reclassify a few things to appeal to the expectations of newer and younger members has always been met with angry "Who moved my cheese" threads. However that may be, the 'assisted' does exist! It is the difference between a full manual film camera, and one which uses electronics to control shutter and aperture settings. But given that the earlier reorganization and addition of a few specific boards in an attempt to normalize hierarchies failed at the gate due to member reactions--that effort was brought to an end. The 'Assisted' term has been removed. Everyone can continue "(doing)....whatever...as one pleases. Sometimes everything is lumped into one thread. So there is no need to categorize."

Another wonderful bug feature brought you by Invision! The glitch is that often the 'my images' tabs on a profile initially display blank. A simple right click, as Sandy notes refreshes the empty space and populates it with images. Hardly intuitive, but that's the only workaround we have found. The problem is in what's called "lazy loading", which does not load all the photos at once--but only adds when viewport is scrolled down. The proper idea is to save bandwidth, not baffle users...

There will be no more worms in this thread! Opening it was enough... 🤠 Yes, it would be so convenient if we could block a whole IP scope--such as 103.0.0.0-103.70.0.255 (our India spam block along with 106.x.x.x), or the two IPv6 blocks where most of the airline ads originate from. We simply do not have and are not being given the tools. As Uncle Walter used to say, "And that's the way it is..."

Let's consider this. Take a look at these current PN statistics: https://www.similarweb.com/website/photo.net/competitors/ We are nothing today in terms of internet ranking. What comment does anyone have over being a global rank of 108,122 with total 120 day visits of 686K, with a bounce rate of 75%? Not something with the heritage of PN to boast about. For too many years and too many migrations, the category forums on PN have become buckets of everything. Supposed technical forums have been consumed by daily and weekly photo contests. The recent complaints over the reorganization of "Mirrorless" reflect habit--not proper forum or SEO indexing of our content. Many things are simply a basket that "whatever" has been tossed into over the decades. Administration has held off on further reconciliation. We are now awaiting instruction or changes from Fiverr administration. Stay tuned!

No suggestions have been discarded. Everything is under consideration and is being assessed for inclusion in a new general management plan--and in many instances recently deployed. As has been clearly and definitively stated in another thread, discussion or argument over PhotoNet management or moderation is not allowed in forum threads. Such complaint or inquire should be directed to @TGOPS or @Sandy Vongries. A proviso to that should be clearly understood. We are willing to hear your complaint--but not bound to address it in any way that would lead to misunderstanding or discord to the community. Management is open to suggestions and ideas. This is why threads are created to solicit such response--and staff addresses "fixes" as they are reasonable and possible. We will continue down this road because we are now part of this community also. Because of failures within the Invision (IPS) Community platform, moderators and administrators are unable to delete images that were present before the October migration debacle. For many users we cannot delete images aside from "one at a time" instances. This is not something that we are going to do for hundreds (and in the case of some, thousands of images). What should work as a selectable "bulk" deletion does not work--nor has action on the part of Invision Community administrators to fix it succeeded. Here is what we can do. Your account (or anyone elses) can be completely deleted, ala GDPR style. The choice is whether a member who requests that is to move on, or create a new account on PhotoNet. Please advise at your earliest convenience.

OK, let's get to the meat of the thing. The spam is coming from a 'human' process along with automated tools workers have to expedite the process. When a site is targeted, the software creates a member profile complete with a viable Gmail or other account. If any challenges are presented, the human solves them. Then the system responds to our registration confirmation email. Then they proceed to post rubbish. The new automatic moderation filter will catch those who do it immediately--if members report what they see. WE HAVE NO MECHANISM AVAILABLE TO US that will automatically filter spam. Nor do we have the ability TO ADD A SINGLE PLUGIN to this board. Nor does the corporate ownership have any plans on spending anything to acquire plugins. So we must crowdsource, and make other filters. Some might work, others not so much. Polishing brass on the Titanic is so much fun. Bosun, count the number of lifeboats, please.

Again we say, the thing is a bollix--and not in a way particular to the limitations of the platform we have today. Several other major board platforms don't seem to know any better either. I sometimes wonder what core platform coders think when setting up functions. Things as simple as a real media manager. Or being able to 'granularly' set permissions for certain functions and where they are to appear. Comments/review are one of those. The options are ridiculous. If the review section is enabled (and it should have a comment section of its own), if ALL commenting is turned off all one can leave is a rating. If it is turned off, one can leave a rating comment/review, but the stupidity is that it adds comments not only to the review but also a general "comment" section. Not only confusing, but absolutely redundant for the purpose. And the developers hard baked it into the core code, and no one offers a plugin to remedy the stupidity. Another fun-filled feature here on PhotoNet.

The answer is simple. The software we operate on is 'less than optimal.' Review gives one little yellow stars to play with, comment awards thumbs, trophies, and star icons. You pick, as the intended purpose kind of fails and no replacement exists. Do we get rid of reviews and stick with comments? That is a partial fix and cuts out confusion. The more functional & featured an application is, the more granular the administrative and styling options. Invision gets a bit dense at times and does not know where to put just comments or just reviews. The latter are intended for gallery and album submissions to certain categories of things. Nor does the basic forum communicate well with the gallery application. Turn something off there, and it happens globally. Perhaps in another incarnation...

Members would be surprised at the number of things forum (and other net platform) software does in the background. These are called 'cron jobs' and they are automated routines that do things at different times. Many of them are called "batch" processes, such as sending any email notices, refreshing the system cache, cleaning out temporary files, etcetera. The refresh on the cache is set to a default of every 5 minutes. Depending on how close one is to when that cron job runs will determine how fast the rubbish disappears from the pages. Clearing the browser cache will not hurry the process, but sometimes that can help with other things! The spammy spam is actually hidden immediately. Thank you to any who is participating in this crowdsourced community policing. Nearly 50 were cleared out in a hot minute and sent to the digital dumpster.

Per your request, we have removed that title from your account.

Let us start here, @Pierre Dumas Esquire. Matt Jensen is no longer involved with PhotoNet, and a new team is in place. Thank you for your comments. There is no copyright infringement. When you joined PhotoNet in 2002, you accepted a user agreement that gave rights to PhotoNet to display member images. By continuing to use PhotoNet across the years you also agreed to any subsequent changes in the Terms of Service. We are not going to argue this matter with anyone. As the present TOS (which everone recently agreed with) states, if you are not willing to abide by the Terms of Service--then simply stated you do not use the service. In accordance with GDPR and other regulations, administration can remove your account complete with all content upon request. Send a PM to @Sandy Vongries or myself and we will execute the process. Once again we wish to reiterate that there are currently NO SUBSCRIPTION options and it has been this way for quite some time. The PhotoNet Pro label remains as an artifact of better times, and recognition of past member support. Let us be clear about this. In the future if anyone wishes to discuss the legal ramifications of operating PhotoNet, it is requested that such inquiries be directed to one of the two administrators previously mentioned. Also, the original thread title was deemed inappropriate by the community and has been renamed. Perhaps while some things recently have been terrible, there has been no terror and the implication of that in a thread title is not acceptable.

PhotoNet has had a 60% increase in spam posting since the migration of the forum platform back in October. Literally from day one, there has been a problem. Available tools have been few--relying mostly on the work of our stalwart moderators. We now have a new tool, you! An automatic moderation rule has been put into place. New spammy members are now subject to being wiped out of the boards and galleries by a simple click of the "Report" button. When someone has been newly registered for under a certain amount of time; has less that 5 posts-- a member report 'hides' all of their content until such time as a moderator or administrator can review it. Then comes the banhammer. When you spot spam, use the report tool on it immediately. Consider yourself an informal part of the moderation team, and help keep our image galleries free of rubbish! 😉

As is said, "more truth than poetry..." 😎

@Dustin McAmera it is indeed a room full of people mostly in India right now. They also have software that creates 'members' on the fly with accompanying Gmail or other working email accounts. The software looks for the confirmation email, then logs in and poops on our party. There are similar operations in the Philippines, Malaysia, and anywhere else cheap labor can be found. From a recollection of "black hat" tactics from a decade ago, I could hire a room of a hundred for $50 per 2500 registrations and postings. Effective this afternoon, we are deploying an extra level of protection: Staff must approve all new member registrations. A little less work, but a whole lot less spam.

We are aware of the incredible spam problem coming out of India. Use your discretion in posting screen shots that contain nudity as one such example may possibly have contained child pornography.

When members of any group upload photos of any size they are automatically downsized to a maximum of 1800x1600px--depending on the canvas size of the original image. Images that are smaller in dimension are not "upsized". The process then stores that downscaled image (likely about 80% quality) and does not save the original upload as it was. The upshot is that even if one uploads an image that is 3000px wide, it will be downsized and the original discarded. As PhotoNet is not a photo bucket or repository such as Flickr but a site for sharing and discussion so this quality is just fine. Larger files mean more storage and bandwidth which lead to more cost. We had to stop things like uploading of 75mb image files. Here is the largest one on the site at 72.5mb: Do screenshots work? Sure. The banner image in the top header was taken as a screen shot from the 2016 version of PhotoNet. Mike Morrrell is correct. Invision is a community platform suite and media handling is slanted toward image uploads and downloads by members. Not really what we are looking for but for now its what we have.

Does the lack of response indicate that no one has any album that came with the migration called "Converted"? If so and then using either the attachments management page (all images in the forum) or deletion one at a time using the image viewer, what images are users unable to delete? We agree it is laborious to click on each album or gallery photo one at a time to delete, but that does work. Please advise.

During the migration a number of member photographs that were in older 'portfolio' galleries were placed in a gallery category called 'Converted Albums'. It appears that there are some permission problems that are difficult to sort out. We would appreciate a few members who have such an "album" to let us know in this thread or via PM so that we can further investigate.

@RobertWPillow We are responding to these things in a certain order and sorting matters out. It's a trivial matter but over 150 major commits (things changed) have been made since we began this this renewal effort on 1/17/2023. Around 125 minor tweaks and adjustments have been made also. You do not want to see the number of things on the punch list going forward. As a developer I am satisfied with the progress so far given the state it was inherited in. The team appreciates everyone's comments and suggestions and we will continue to solicit them and communicate with members as appropriate. I myself have put in nearly 50 hours this past week appraising, adjusting, and working on this site. This is not our "regular" paid job. Rather we have taken on this project as volunteers donating our time and skills to this endeavor. This effort is for the benefit of the community and the survival of this venue. Everyone is invited to check out our new temporary front page loaded today. It is much improved over the stock homepage that was left up by previous admins. It is not permanent as a new one is being shaped based on member comments. Thank you for your comments.

SOLVED! In response to your comments, the ability to select a different user theme is now available. The default PhotoNet Sidebars v2 theme displays the right sidebar throughout the site. Choosing PhotoNet No Sidebars v2.1 theme removes them. This feature is subject to future availability, and may become subject to subscription. Theme option control is located at the bottom of the site in the footer, as shown below.