mottershead

I don't see what problem you are trying to solve. There are already plenty of places on the site to see various sets of photos that are picked by the members. The POW is where you get to see the weekly selection of a rotating group of long-time participants on the site (the so-called Elves). And the Featured Portfolio is where you get to see my selections. If you aren't interested in those, and want to see the selections of "the membership", there is the TRP, among other venues.

Views are counted whenever there is a hit in the web logs on the image file, including the small size. So, the counter will be incremented when someone opens the folder, or your entire portfolio.

THere is no set amount of time. Generally, they go for at least a week. But they often go for longer. I am the one who picks them, and I basically pick a new one when the current one seems to have been up long enough, and I have time to decide on the next one.

There are a lot of countries where $25 is a lot of money. Many people in the United States can't afford $25 in order to belong to an Internet site, either, especially students and people on fixed incomes. All we ask is that if you are frequenting the site and also are spending money on cameras, film, processing, software, media, books, ISP charges, magazine subscriptions, etc, that photo.net not be left out of the budget simply because it is viewed as "free". It isn't and fair is fair.

 

If you aren't buying these things and are nevertheless interested in photography, you are very welcome to visit photo.net as often you like and participate as much as you want without subscribing. But at least have the good grace not to complain about the ads, since it is the advertisers who are paying for you. If holding your tongue about the advertisers is too much for you, then nothing compels you to visit the site.

Well, the message refers to spammers, and that is one of the problems, but the real problem is using tags in your HTML code that we don't want to support even if you are a subscriber. So the solution is simply to use more vanilla HTML and stay away from tags that potentially change the layout and graphical look.

Thanks for the information. It will be interesting too see if there is a correlation between that ad and the problem. Has anyone else observed this?

You already mentioned two of the ways: TRP and the category page. Clicking on a photo in either of these opens the photo. Clicking on your name opens your Portfolio page which shows all your photos, grouped by folder. Clicking on the folder takes people to those folders. There is also "Rate Recent" photos. Then there is the Critique Forum list. Photocritique alerts. I am sure there are others. TRP accounts for a lot of views just by itself.

Like I said, I think it is an interesting idea.

The various TRP views are recomputed regularly, but the cycle varies according to how long the view is. The Daily views (24 hour view) are recomputed hourly; the 3-Day views are recomputed every 4 hours; the Week and Month views are recomputed daily, and the longer views are recomputed every 14 days. Each time that there is a recomputation every rating which the photo has received that is eligible is included. The only ratings that aren't eligible are (1) 1 and 2 ratings, and (2) ratings from people who have recently signed up on the site. Eventually, those people aren't new in anymore and the ratings that were previously ineligible become eligible and are counted.

 

So if the photo continues to receive ratings, or some of its previous ratings were previously ineligible, you will see its score in the TRP change.

I hope the previous answer is supposed to be a joke because it is not true.

Periodically, there is a database maintainance job that removes equipment that isn't associated with any photos. It isn't run very often, but I did run it a couple of months ago. I guess it didn't occur to anyone that people were entering any more equipment than had been used with photos they had uploaded.

I don't think you should play games. Just turn the matter over to the police, would be my advice, and follow their instructions on how to deal with the other party.

If you become a subscriber, you won't see 95% of the ads. If you aren't a subscriber, then the ads are what makes it possible for you to visit the site without having to pay.

The photos in this forum thread are not by Jock Sturges. And when I asked Jock to remove certain photos from his portfolio, he removed the portfolio without a single complaint or harsh comment.

I only have a record of receiving one payment. It was yesterday. Can you tell me when the other one was, so I can try to trace it?

Some people have asked for this. They want to buy gift subscriptions for existing subscribers. It doesn't mean you aren't a subscriber.

I changed things so that the button to buy someone a gift subscription is displayed even if the person already has a subscription.

There is a gift subscription procedure, but it only lets you buy a one year subscription for someone. I am trying to work around this problem for pnina.

The code for generating the TRP has been checked pretty thoroughly and no bugs in its algorithms have been

found for a long time. If your photo isn't showing up in a particular TRP view, the reason is usually

one of the following:

 

1) The TRP views are based on the date you uploaded the photo, not the date you submitted it for critique.

If you uploaded the photo, then waited some days to submit it for critique, it won't be eligible for the 3 day

view, which is the default. Look for the photo in the longer views, like week, or month.

 

 

2) The various views require a minimum number of ratings. The longer the view, the more ratings that are

required to be in that view. The photo might have a high score, but not enough ratings to be in a particular view.

The Rate Recent views (which include the default) require a minimum number of Rate Recent ratings. You might

have quite a few ratings overall, but not enough Rate Recent ratings for those views.

 

 

3) The views are not recomputed in real time. The 1-day view is computed hourly, the 3-day view is computed

every 4 hours, the medium length views are computed daily, and the very long views, like All and Year, are computed every

14 days. Your photo might appear the next time the view is computed. You can see the time when a view

was last computed up near the top.

Carl, of course the other examples Wikipedia gives of "range voting" are scoring in some Olympic events, and Web rating sites for movies (IMDB), etc. They don't mention photo.net or "Am I Hot or Not", but those are also clear examples of range voting.

 

As I said earlier, there are many different voting systems. Most of them are entirely theoretical and have never been used in an actual election of public officials, or indeed anywhere. There is a lot of theoretical work on voting systems. One of the most interesting results is the Arrow Paradox. Kenneth Arrow, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, showed mathematically that is it impossible to satisfy five basic "fairness" constraints on voting systems. At first sight, the constraints seem obvious and trivial. Things like "non-dictatorship": there should not be one special voter who determines the outcome. But it is impossible to devise a voting system to satisfy them all.

Carl, you might want to read the articles on "Voting" and "Range Voting" on the Wikipedia before you continue this line of argument.

I don't think the aim of photo.net is to "teach people what is good photography", as if the principles of good photography were carved in tablets, to be revealed on this site.

 

Rather, I would say the aims are:

 

(1) to help people understand what others admire, and are drawn to, in photographs. If the Top Rated Photos pages show anything, it is that there is an enormous range of genres, styles, subjects, techniques, and approaches to photography that are appreciated (or not) by different people and groups.

 

(2) help and inspire them to make the types of photographs that they want to make -- photos that will have value to the photographer and othes. We do this mainly by getting photographers to share technical information, by presenting numerous examples, and by motivating people to look at photographs closely.

 

The editor of a site like photo.net doesn't need to be an aesthetic absolutist or elitist. On the contrary, it seems to me that an aesthetic relativist like me is the perfect person to be running a site like photo.net, even if I do say so myself. As you say, it would be bizarre if an aesthetic absolutist thought a reasonable way to create an exhibition of photos was to let the Internet public vote.

 

By the way, your attempt to link moral relativism to aesthetic relativism misses the mark. There is no logical necessity for an aesthetic relativist to be a moral relativist.

Hi Pnina, sorry about missing your question. Unfortunately, we can't charge your card for extra subscription time on the gift subscription. We don't keep the credit card number around. We only have it long enough to complete the transaction, and we don't store it in our database. This is to maximize your security, but it does make things a bit more inconvenient.

 

If you wanted to give someone a three year subscription instead of one, the only way to do that right now is to purchase three 1 year subscriptions. That would result in a total time of 3 years, since the three subscriptions would be added together. Unfortunately, this would cost $75 (3 x $25). This is more expensive than 3-year subscription, which normally costs $68.

 

I guess I should offer both 1- and 3-year subscriptions. Meanwhile, if you wanted to purchase two more 1-year gift subscriptions for your friend, I'll watch for them, and give you a $7.00 refund, to get you back to what it should have cost.

Carl, My point is that the low ratings on your photo prove only that people didn't think much of it. You do, since you uploaded it. If "expert photographers", such as yourself, would rate it highly, great. All that establishes is that expert photographers sometimes have a different way of looking at images than the population that rates photos on photo.net. Not a better way, just different. So, what?

 

Anyway, I increasingly think that there are no objective standards for aesthetic responses. One can perhaps predict how various populations will respond to an image, just as one can sometimes predict any group behaviour. But my view is that there is no basis for saying that one group is superior to any other group as regards aesthetic responses. There is no priveleged position in the aesthetic universe, no center -- no canonical population to whose aesthetic judgements every other aesthetic judgement must yield.

 

That means that there is no basis for saying that the aesthetic judgements of the man in the street are wrong, or that, for example, "expert photographers" are right. There are only groups that you wish to impress, and those you don't.

 

I suppose there could be some aesthetic universals. There might be a picture that would constitute a test of humanity -- a kind of Turing picture. The universal 7/7 photo. If you don't like it, you must be a monster, or a mutant, or lying, or maybe an artificial intelligence. If so, I'd like somebody to tell me what these aesthetic universals are -- what properties the universal 7/7 photo must have. And I'd like to know where those universals come from. I personally don't think there are aesthetic universals, or that the universal 7/7 photo can exist. But if it can, it isn't a distorted-looking picture of reflective balls.

 

Now, what does all that have to do with Critique Only?

By the way, if there is anybody who can regularly reproduce this problem and is willing to work with me over the phone on troubleshooting it, I'd love to hear from you.