mottershead

By the way, on the Community Member page, the rating counts include ratings given anonymously. So, if you see that someone has given 8 ratings that includes anonymous ratings given in the Rate Recent queue. Also, if you look at "Photos Rated Highest By This Member", that includes photos which were rated 6 and 7 by the person. That includes anonymous ratings also. So, if you want to find out the anonymous person who gave you a 7, you only have to check out the "Photos Rated Highest" page of a couple of hundred thousand other people to find out, (on the average).

There is a known problem with a particular ISP in South Africa. The problem you are reporting has been reported over the last two years by a few other photo.net members with that ISP, and by nobody else in the world. That ISP is probably running a faulty proxy server that is essentially returning pages from its cache, WITH the cookies. That is a no-no. This effectively logs you in as the other person, since being logged in on photo.net means presenting the proper cookie. If you noticed, the other Workspace that you ended up in is that of another photo.net member from South Africa with the same ISP as you. Probably other people with your ISP have from time to time found themselves in your workspace. Doesn't it strike you as rather an amazing coincidence that the people who are landing in other member's Workspaces all have the same South African ISP? If there was a photo.net bug, why would it drop you into the Workspace of someone who just happened to share your ISP and not some random other person? And why would it be always the same South African ISP, and no other ISP?

 

You might be able to rectify the problem by logging out of photo.net and logging back in, but this might only work after a wait, and it could happen again.

 

There isn't really anything that I can do about this. It needs to be taken up with the ISP. I've told this same thing to some other people in this situation. Apparently they didn't follow my suggestion, perhaps thinking I was just brushing them off, or they didn't get anywhere with the ISP.

 

If you would like to try your luck with the Technical Support at the ISP, I'd be happy to work through the problem with them via email or phone. But it will probably be hard to convince them that it is their problem and not ours. The reason that I know it isn't our problem, is that it is literally the case that every time this problem is reported it turns out to be a South African member of photo.net with that ISP. The problem gets reported every few months, and people are always amazed when my first question is: are you in South Africa? even when there has been no mention of South Africa up to that point. If you hadn't put (RSA) after your signature, I would be asking *you* if you are in South Africa.

It is only in the Leica forum, and it only applies to new people. Its purpose was to slow down trolls creating bogus accounts and posting a lot of junk or getting involved in flame wars. That forum goes through periods of that -- more so than the other forums. When you are new, you get to ask your question or post a comment, make a follow-up, and then you have to wait. After about a week, you should be able to post normally.

There is currently a bug in the system, where a "new member" rating might be through its suspension period and would be counted, but the photo averages and totals haven't been recomputed. Currently, the averages and totals are recomputed in real-time whenever someone adds a rating to the photo. That includes "new" members adding a rating, even though their rating might not end up counting. But the software isn't going regularly through all the photos and automatically recomputing the totals for photos that were rated by members previously regarded as new who are now eligible to be counted. Those suspended ratings remain suspended, in effect, until another rating on a photo unsuspends them, or something else occurs which causes the totals and averages for the photo to be recalculated.

 

Occasionally, there is a batch job that goes through and recalculates all the ratings. So, at those points all the "new" ratings that are not "new" will also get counted.

 

If someone else rates a photo, all the ratings are counted, including any suspended new member ratings that now shouldn't be suspended. But there are probably a lot of suspended "new" ratings on photos that never got another rating after the last suspended "new member" rating, and those suspended ratings have effectively remained suspended. This is why sometimes people say there are new member ratings on their photos that don't seem ever to have been counted. They are right.

 

Actually, I don't know whether this is a bug or a feature. Its main down-side is that it is confusing and makes the system look broken to anybody who notices it. Usually people don't notice. (People who do notice are probably paying far too close attention to their ratings.) I could probably make an argument that it was part of some well-thought-out master plan. But the truth is that it falls into the category of "unintended consequences which useful side-effects".

As the previous poster said, it is always based on the previous 24 hours, not on calendar days. So, you don't get 4 more at midnight (whenever that might be for you.) Rather, when you try to submit one, it looks back at the previous 24 hours and if you submitted four during that period, it won't let you submit another one.

When you submit a photo, it goes to the front of the rating queue. If *anybody* is currently in the Rate Recent feature, the next photo they see will be that photo. Since there are generally a lot of people in the Rate Recent feature, a photo will get quite a lot of ratings quite soon after being submitted. The majority of anonymous ratings will be "instantanous".

 

On many, even most, photos some of these early ratings will be 3 ratings, since there is a range of opinions, tastes, and tempers. More of them will be higher ratings. People notice the early low ratings, remember them, and start to think "bots", especially with all the clamour about bots in this forum. When the early ratings are high, people reckon that is normal, and think nothing more about it. They don't remember those cases.

 

Even if they did remember all the "instantaneous" high ratings, nobody considers then as evidence of bots, although there are many more of them than "instantaneous" 3 ratings. Indeed, 3's represent about only 10% of the early ratings, just as they represent only about 10% of all ratings. But the 90% of early ratings that are non-3's don't seem to be considered "proof" by anyone that there is a non-3 robot out there lying in wait to hit their photos with an instantanous non-3.

 

Despite the fact that there is about 9 times more evidence for an instantanous non-3 robot than there is for an instantaneous 3 robot, we only ever here about the 3's and the 3/3 robot waiting under the bed to hit photos with instantaneous low ratings. Ever wondered how people came to believe in ghosts and monsters?

It will take some time as the various views come up to their recomputation times.

We only provide refunds during the first 60 days. In the first 30 days, it is more or less "no questions asked". I say "more or less", because we don't provide a refund even in the first 30 days if someone was screwing around on the site and was banned. But apart from that rare case, it is basically "no questions asked". But beyond 30 days and up to 60 days, we will provide a refund if the credit card company is likely to buy the reason, since in that case there would be a chargeback if we didn't do the refund. The credit card company doesn't think someone protesting a change in editorial direction is a valid chargeback reason, and we don't do refunds for that reason beyond 30 days.

As I said, we don't share email addresses with anyone. It's in our privacy policy. So, if your @photo.net email address leaked to a magazine, they must have gotten it without our permission.

Does this happen on one computer only, or on all computers from which you access the site. Is it with only one browser? I'm not saying this to get you to change browsers or anything, but if you try a different browser do you have the same problem?

I've been trying to figure this out. I can't reproduce it myself. If you can consistently reproduce the problem ("reproduce" is programmer talk for "make the problem happen at will"), and are willing to work with me on the phone for a while to experiment with some things, that would be helpful.

We never furnish email addresses to other people. photo.net members can find out the email addresses of other members, and it is possible that someone has looked up your address. It would be very tedious for someone to harvest email addresses of very many people, and it would have to be done over a very long period of time with a lot of different bogus accounts, because we have systems to prevent very many addresses being handed out very fast.

A photo submitted on June 24 could have 58000 views if it belonged to a highly visible photographer or ended up on the first page or two of the Top Rated Photos. In the five days that the photo has been on the site (inclusive of the 24th but not counting today), that works out to only about 12,000 views per day for the photo. That is well within the realm of possibility; in fact, every day's submissions see a few photos getting that kind of visibility. "Views" includes any hit on the server for the photo image, including the thumbnails. There are millions of views per day across the site. The Top Rated Photo pages alone get about 500,000 impressions per day, and there are between six and twenty thumbnails per page, depending on the size of the viewers' monitors. So the Top Rated Photos feature generates millions of views per day just by itself.

 

As a matter of fact, 58,000 doesn't even make the photo you mentiond the most-viewed from those uploaded on June 24. The highest viewed photo from that day has 61000 views. The highest viewed photo from yesterday already has 14,000 views, and that just counts the views it got yesterday, since today's views won't be counted until tomorrow morning. The highest view count of any photo on the site is 5.7 million views. That is on a photo submitted in 2002, and which was helped by being a Photo of the Week at some stage.

 

By the way, non-subscribers can submit their photos for critique. One critique request per day. Subscribers get 4 per day.

I logged in as you and saw a portfolio, folders, equipment, etc. All of this is updated in real-time, so I don't know why you didn't see it yourself.

That is probably just a temporary problem. It means that between the time you were on PayPal authorizing the charge and the time you got back to photo.net to finish the transaction, the PayPal server started returning errors. As the message suggests, probably the problem will clear up if you just try again after waiting some time for the PayPal guys to fix their problem.

There was a problem with some of the logs not getting processed over the last week or so. Things will catch up tomorrow.

The discrepancy is usually caused by the fact that some ratings from new members are shown in the details but don't count in the totals for some number of days.

Please use the site as a Trial/Guest member. We only take credit cards and PayPal payments, and both our credit card company and PayPal have a list of countries from which they accept payment. Croatia is not on either list. We also are not in a position to handle non-U.S. checks.

The photo database ran out of disk space. We have more disks, but some hardware reorganization is needed to use them. I have freed up enough space while we do this. The problem should be fixed.

Log out and log back in. As a subscriber, you shouldn't be seeing those ads. If you are, your cookie is stale, and you need to re-login in.

They are different because the POW discussion is actually a forum thread with a moderator. There is POW forum, and you can see its index page just like any other forum. The forum moderators have the same tools as in any other forum.

 

The comments on normal photos are not "forum threads" and the tools available for administering them are not as flexibile as those moderators have on forum threads. Why there is a difference between "forum threads" and "photo comment threads", I don't know, and I think this is probably bad design, but that is the situation.

 

Anyway, to complicate matters further the POW is a special case. The code that displays photos and their comment threads knows about POW's, and during the week a photo is the POW, the forum thread discussion is merged in and the "Critiques" include both the "photo comments" and the "POW forum thread". If you go to the POW Forum and select the POW discussion, you will see only the POW discussion. But if you click on the POW thumbnail, e.g. on the Home Page, then you will see the photo comment thread for the POW (essentially, the comments before it was selected as POW) and the POW forum discussion, merged together.

Darrell's model was one of the main alternatives back when we discussed this before, and we basically decided to implement this approach. It will be a bit more complicated than just a link. Probably we will allow people to associate a Format/Price List page with any photo, listing the formats and prices for each photo, with URL's for purchasing. How those URL's are structured and where they go, will be up to the photographer, and payment and fulfillment will be the responsibility of the buyer and seller.

 

It is in our development plans for 2006, and we might see this by late summer. This feature will probably be available at a premium price, probably around $60 per year.

The TRP is down while we do some database maintenance.

Not sure what you mean by "applications", unless you are talking about javascript.

 

Apart from javascript code that runs on photo.net pages, photo.net shouldn't be installing any applications on your system, and if you see it doing that, or trying to, it means either that a photo.net member is screwing around and has slipped something non-kosher into a post, etc. Or else it means that one of our advertisers is doing something he/she shouldn't be doing. If you find either of those cases, I would like to know about it immediately.

 

photo.net itself does not install code or files on your computer.

 

As for cookies, a lot of anti-"spyware" programs go nuts about cookies. photo.net and its advertisers do put cookies on your browser for various purposes. If this bothers you, you can block the cookies, but some things on the site might stop working. For example, blocking cookies will prevent you from logging in as a member. Other cookies are designed to count how many times you have seen a particular ad, and blocking those will mean you will keep seeing the same ad.

About 47% of the photo.net audience (that includes visitors as well as logged-in members) is from the United States, 7% from the United Kingdom, and 6% from Canada. These are the big three. Australia is number four at 2.7%. Other countries that top 2% are Germany, France, Italy, and Iran. Spain and Netherlands are just under 2%. Europe as a whole adds up to about 30% or more, with Western Europe much better represented than Central and Eastern Europe. After Iran, the only other Middle Eastern country that is significant is Israel, at about .5%. In Asia, the largest country is India at 1.2%, but China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan aren't far behind, while the remaining countries in Asia are hardly represented at all. The only Latin American country in the Top 50 country list is Mexico at .6%. The only African country in the Top 50 is South Africa, with .3% of the audience.

 

Regarding information being logged by photo.net (or any web sites), people who aren't familiar with the technical side of the web are almost always wrong when it comes to how much web sites know about them. They are either too paranoid, or not paranoid enough. Too paraoid, in that they imagine that web sites are collecting all sorts of personal information that they don't in fact collect, and couldn't. Not paranoid enough in that they don't realize that they do leave a trail of information behind them as they visit various web sites, and this is enough to build up a profile of their web browsing if the information could be collected from multiple web site operators and correlated.

 

The only information that web sites can collect through the standard protocol includes: the date/time of the page request, the IP address making the request, the URL that was retrieved, other headers in the HTTP request including the cookies, the user-agent string which the browser sent to describe itself, and the so-called "referer" URL sent by the browser, which is supposed to be the URL from which the request is coming. The last two things are optional, and a lot of browsers don't send them.

 

The information doesn't include country, but this can be inferred with about 97% accuracy from the IP address, and that is where our country information comes from.

 

Because a lot of web sites use Google Analytics, they could in theory correlate this information, and build up a profile of what web pages a particular IP address has been visiting. However, if you read the Google Analytics Privacy Policy, you will see that they don't in fact do this. Neither do any of the other ad networks of which photo.net is a member. The only one that comes close to something like this is Revenue Science, which doesn't create a web site visit history on IP addresses but does use the fact that an IP address has visited photo.net to classify that IP address as one that might be more interested in photography-related advertising.