mottershead

photo.net is written for "standards compliant" browsers such as Firefox, plus IE version 6, which is not "standards compliant", but gets some deference because it is common.

 

However, it is impossible to test everything. In forum threads, for example, we allow people to make attachments to their posts, and IE is known to have problems with some image formats. Another problem is that sometimes the IE browser cache is full, and this results in odd behaviour. IE is also more prone to be made flaky by spyware/adware, etc, than other browsers, and you might be having problems because of that.

 

If clearing the cache doesn't work, and you give me the URLs of the threads that are causing problems, then I can see if I can reproduce the problem with my copy of IE.

That isn't the right URL, so I have no idea what might be in that thread which would cause you problems. One thing that IE has problems with is some image formats. Other times, you need to clear the cache. IE is a flaky browser, and it is known photo.net allows people to post attachments on forum posts that can give it problems. Most threads on photo.net do not cause these problems, just as most threads on other sites don't cause problems. If you have problems with these threads, there isn't much we can do about it (especially if you don't tell us properly which thread it is), other than to suggest that you try a different browser.

With IE, these kinds of problems are often resolved by clearing your browser cache.

 

But you might want to get a different browser. IE is what comes with Windows, of course, but it is simple to install a better one, such as Firefox.

The views are tabulated by scanning through the web logs from the previous day. This is done at 7:00 in the morning, and it typically takes about 10 to 20 minutes. So, somewhat after 7:00 AM Eastern time, you will see the number of views increase, reflecting views from the previous calendar day (Eastern time).

 

This means that a particular view will take between 7 hours and 31 hours to be reflected in the counts. The best case is a hit just before midnight Eastern time. This will be counted about 7 hours later. The worst case is a hit just after midnight Eastern Time. This won't be counted for about 31 hours.

Yeah, yeah. But I'm still not getting what the debate is supposed to be about.

If Details were persistent, then other people would be posting that "Critiques" should be persistent.

New forums are started by the site administrators. You can propose a new one in this forum, and it will be discussed.

 

We are conservative about starting them because we want new forums to be active, but not to cannibalize an existing forum, and we don't like to make mistakes, since we have a policy of not closing forums that have been started. The Costa Rica forum probably wouldn't be started on the site today, but it has been around for a long time and is still somewhat active.

What is your point? Are you suggesting that the site should be censoring this photo, or that it is inconsistent somehow in not censoring it? Why? Or are you just trying to start an argument (otherwise known as trolling)? Please be a bit more clear.

 

As long as you have posted this, I don't see anything in that photo in which the moderators of the site need to take any interest at all. What section of the Terms of Use do you think it violates?

 

The portfolio includes some documentary shots of a gathering, apparently, of some fascist-type organization, with captions suggesting strong criticism by the photographer of his subjects. A moderator might want to monitor the discussion to make sure that it stays on-topic (that is, the photos) and does not become a political flame war. But apart from that, what is there about this photo to concern a moderator?

IE has some bugs related to displaying image files, which obviously cause problems on photo-related web sites. These kind of reports come up with some frequency in this forum, and most of the time the advice of "clearing the cache" seems to work -- to the point that this is the more or less automatic advice these days.

I second Emre's suggestion of the Digital Darkroom forum for photography-related computer questions.

Han, you call yourself a "dimepincher", but tell us why "freeloader" isn't more accurate. It is a Trial account. Unless you have some justification, such as not being able to afford $25 because you are a student, then the proper response here is not to delete photos down to your new quota, but to clear out. Or else, subscribe.

 

Seems like you've had long enough to decide which. If you don't think the service is worth $25, you've decided. Don't just keep your portfolio on the site because you don't have to pay. You do. If you don't want to subscribe by now, its time to leave.

 

By the way, I'm always surprised by so-called "dimepinchers". I recognize that this isn't true everywhere in the world, or for everybody, but in the U.S. and many other places, $25 isn't that much money. I can't understand why someone would continue wasting their time with something that is sub-par and doesn't really meet their needs, just to save $25.00. I don't really want people staying around on photo.net because they think it is "free". It isn't, and interpreting a Trial membership as "free" is dishonest.

Hi Megan,

 

We give photo quota for participation, based on the number of critique requests, comments given, and ratings given and ratings received. This morning we changed the formula, putting more weight on comments given, and less weight on ratings. The most important factor is number of critique requests.

 

Part of the reason for this change was to get people with fairly large portfolios to become subscribers. The main aim of the free quota is to give people enough photo quota so that they can upload photos to the Photo Critique forum. People start off with a quota of at least five photos, and submitting a critique request always increases the quota by one. So as long as you submit every photo for critique, you will always be within your quota. If, in addition to that, you rate and comment on photos, and receive ratings, then you will get additional quota (only not as much as before for the these things).

 

Of course, you can also become a subscriber. This will give you unlimited photos in your portfolio. With 115 photos in your portfolio alread, you really should be thinking about that. At the level of 115 photos, almost everybody is a subscriber. The Trial/Guest status is supposed to be so that you can decide if the site is interesting enough to be worth a $25 subscription.

People sometimes upload images which give IE trouble, such as you describe. In the Gallery section we try to remove the things from images that we know cause difficulties, but in Forum attachments, such as in the No Words forum, we don't. If you see this happening, the only real solution is to use a different browser, or to stay away from the specific threads which you have found to cause you problems.

Thanks to everyone for their comments, Lannie, John, and Sam, especially.

 

I would just like to underscore that last point by Sam. Mr Sturges was very gentlemanly in his exchange of emails with me, and he reacted to my request in a very polite way. I would not like to see this thread devolve into Jock-bashing. (I'm glad that it hasn't so far.)

 

My actions in this episode have nothing to do with my opinion of Mr Sturges or his work, and entirely to do with photo.net's policies concerning what is appropriate content for the site, and our intent to apply those policies uniformly.

The right way to think about it is that the rules apply to everybody but that does not necessarily mean that they have actually been applied (yet) to everyone to whom they should be applied. The reason is generally that a photo that would trigger the application of a rule may not have been noticed.

 

Also, many of the rules require judgement, and the people exercsing judgement may not always be consistent with one another or even with themselves over time. For a rule like the "no child nudes" rule, which in its current form is quite objective and specific, judgement is still required in determining the ages or in whether the photographer should be queried concerning the ages. Judgement is also required in deciding what to do about images that were uploaded when the rule was not as specific as it is now.

To Peter Singhofen: We still allow images of nude children under the age of four, and it was only recently that we made the terms specific regarding this lower age limit. Before that we didn't bother with images of very young children, up to six or seven, or so, worrying more about images of prepubescent and adolescent children. We left the definition of "young" vague.

 

Personally I think people are nuts if they see wrong in pictures of very young children, and I can't help but think that they might be a bit sick to find such images shocking. Maybe it is because I lived for years in France, where females of all ages are routinely topless on the beach, young children are often naked, and nobody thinks a thing of it. But people in the United States are getting more and more hysterical on this issue. I'm fifty years old, and I can't recall that attitudes were like this in the U.S. thirty years ago. Pretty soon people will face charges if they are found in possession of images of their own babies in the bathtub. In fact, from time to time, one reads of fathers being turned in to the police by overzealous photo processing clerks for precisely that.

 

Regarding the images you point out, I never noticed your image when it was on the site. As for the other one, now that you have posted it, I do recall it, but I had forgotten it. You are apparently very impressed by my omniscience concerning what is uploaded to the site. I am sorry to disillusion you, but I have not examined all of the few million images that we have on the site. I don't even make an effort to review all the images, and I don't have a photographic recall of the large numbers of images that I have seen. Images come to my attention because from time to time I like to look at the TRP, the same as everyone else, or because something draws my attention to an image.

 

There may well be inconsistency in the application of our rules. This is not because we have different sets of rules for different people on the site. It is because we don't review all the photos on the site and there are many images that we don't know about. It may come as a surprise to you that controversies can rage for years in the Gallery without my knowing about it. I spend most of my time not as a visitor to this site but behind the scenes tweaking the hardware and the software, dealing with advertisers, etc, etc.

 

You didn't mention this, but another common theme is that we only delete images by way of knuckling under to complaints. The fact is that we remove images that violate our Terms of Use when we see them. Many times, it is debatable and we think about it for a while, or wait to see how the portfolio develops, and what else the person uploads. Much of the time, the photographer's reaction to having a photo deleted is to complain about someone else's portfolio that is similar and to demand to know why he/she is being singled out. The response is then to delete that other portfolio. Actually, people complaining about our hypocrisy and inconsistency are among our most reliable sources of information about images that are violating the Terms of Use.

 

So you are wrong about the reasons for the inconsistency, but don't let that stop you from reporting it -- I mean pointing it out.

Thanks Michael. I see from our logs that the AOL messages are now going through again. I don't know how long it will be, though, because I've figured out what the "problem" really is, probably, and the situation isn't good. I originally thought that people were flagging our alerts as spam, but I couldn't understand how there would be enough people doing that for us to accumulate a lot of complaints. I now believe that was not the issue.

 

The way I figured it out was that last Friday I went ahead and signed up for for the AOL feedback loop, and my request was "granted". Last night, I was notified via email that someone had complained that a photo.net message was spam. The message was attached. There is no doubt that it was indeed a spam message -- in fact, a kind of nasty one, advertising a sex toy. Of course the message did not originate on photo.net. photo.net isn't running a sideline business in sex toys, in case anybody is in doubt. Rather, the message in question had been sent to a mailbox@photo.net forwarding address set up by a subscriber and then forwarded to the subscriber's AOL mailbox.

 

photo.net doesn't filter messages that are sent to these forwarding addresses. It just forwards them, on the assumption that the recipients want them, or that the subscribers will have their own spam filters to deal with the ones they don't want.

 

The problem is that when someone flags a message like that as spam, AOL holds it against photo.net, which forwarded the message, not against the originator of the message. In fairness, AOL can't really figure out by the time it receives the message who actually originated it, without relying on the message headers, which can easily be forged. AOL knows for sure only which server handed them the message; they can't tell with any reliability whether anything else in the headers is true.

 

That said, mail forwarding is a very common service, and it seems wrong for AOL to blacklist mail forwarders like photo.net when we are only providing the service that we have been paid to provide by our subscribers, who also happen to be AOL's subscribers. The person complaining to AOL that a message is spam is complaining about the originator, not about their mail forwarding service, photo.net. I am sure they don't realize that AOL is interpreting those complaints as being against photo.net.

 

For photo.net, this is pretty serious, if our ability to deliver email to AOL subscribers is blocked, it will mean not only that we can't forward email to mailbox@photo.net subscribers whose actual mailboxes are on AOL, and that we can't send email alerts to AOL subscribers. It will mean also that AOL subscribers won't be able to sign up on the site, because we won't have any way to deliver a welcome message to them with their password.

 

It may be that in order to protect our ability to send mail to AOL subscribers, we will have to turn off the mailbox@photo.net forwarding service to AOL mailboxes.

I think a lot of people are missing the point. The issue isn't really whether photo.net should support Jock Sturges and how risky that would be.

 

The issue is that photo.net has a rule prohibiting the uploading of images involving child nudity, a rule which was contravened by some of the images in Jock's portfolio, apparently. We informed him of the rule and asked him to remove the images that violated it, and he decided to remove all the images except one. Should we have this rule or should we make an exception for Jock Sturges or other famous photographers?

 

I don't think we should make exceptions to our rules for photographers who are famous. Most people will not read our Terms of Use; they will form their idea of what is acceptable on the site by what they see on the site. I don't think we can practically have one set of rules for "famous" photographers and a different set of rules for everybody else. If we tried it, we would constantly be having to explain to people that they aren't allowed to upload certain types of content even though they see that type of content in the portfolios of famous photographers on the site. Besides, people wouldn't think that it was fair for there to be one set of rules for famous photogaphers and another set of rules for them. They would be right. So if we have a rule about acceptable content, it should apply to everybody, celebrated photographer or beginner.

 

As for whether we should have the rule against child nudity at all, I recognize that not all child nudity is pornography. One only has to look at Jock's works to see this. But the United States is a country where the majority of people seem to think that all images involving child nudity are beyond the pale. There is no convincing most Americans that there is such a thing as an "artistic" child nude.

 

So it is very risky for us to allow people to upload images of child nudity. As Jock has experienced, we might very well find ourselves in expensive litigation, or even facing criminal charges. And I don't think things have calmed down in America since Jock faced the charges against him. On the contrary, fear of child pornography and pedophiles on the internet seems to have increased in America, and I think that makes people even less likely to countenance images involving child nudity than they were in the 1990's.

 

We would face a substantial risk even if we could guarantee that every image involving child nudity was as restrained, as sensitive -- as artistic -- as Jock Sturges' images. But we can't even do that. photo.net is a site where anybody can upload anything without prior review. There is no telling what people would upload, but if our experience with adult nudes is any guide, it would run the gamut from sublime to disgusting, with a long slippery slope in between. If having "artistic" child nudes on the site wasn't risky enough, it would be a hundred times riskier situation for child pornography to be found on the site that had been uploaded without our knowledge, and it seemed to the authorities that we had invited the images and that we condoned them.

 

Leaving aside the risk, I shudder at opening the door to some of what would be uploaded if people got the idea that photo.net was an "anything goes" place regarding child nudity, and I don't want anything to do with it. As much as I respect what I think Jock Sturges is trying to do, I would rather the site be inhospitable to Jock than leave a shred of doubt as to whether photo.net is hospitable to images that exploit children.

 

So this isn't a rule that we are going to change, and there aren't going to be any exceptions.

 

(Re-posted from discussion on Jock Sturges portfolio)

Ellis, I believe it was Jock Sturges and not an imposter. He paid for a subscription with a credit card issued to that name.

On Friday, I asked Jock to remove the images in his portfolio that involved nude models under the age of eighteen. These are not allowed under the Terms of Use of the site. Jock said in an email to me that he understood the need of the site for its rules, but that he didn't wish to "censor himself". Accordingly, he has decided to remove all images in his portfolio except one. I respect his decision and I regret that photo.net cannot host his portfolio.

 

Jock Sturges is a photographer of considerable reputation. His images are featured in many books, as well as museum and gallery collections. Through his books and exhibitions, Jock has been able to remind some people that nude images of children must not automatically be classified as pornography. In the United States, that is a very difficult thing to do. I think he has done so with delicacy and restraint, although not without some considerable cost to himself.

 

But on a public web site where anyone can upload images without prior review, there are too many who would claim to be pulling up next to Jock Sturges, but who would actually be charging past Jock, past any boundary of decency, and into the territory of child pornography. The site cannot permit that to happen, or to create even a hint of allowing it or condoning it. If all the portfolios on photo.net were curated onto the site, I might risk it (I'm not sure), but not when anyone can upload anything and we have to find it in order to remove it. I shudder to think of photo.net becoming a destination for people with a sick interest in these type of images.

 

We have already seen what might unfold by looking at what happens on the site with images of adult nudes. There are many impressive portfolios of artistic nudes on this site. But we also must regularly delete pornographic images. Some people can't tell the difference. Others think that because photo.net permits images of nudes, that it must be a porn site. Others realize that the site doesn't permit pornography but upload it anyway because they are trolls trying to make trouble or trying to make a point about "censorship". And in between the images that most of our audience would agree are artistic and those that almost everyone would agree are pornography, there is a long slippery slope where there is perpetual disagreement. For the site, the issue is basically a no-win. There are many images in the boundary zone, where we will be criticized if we delete them, and criticized if we don't. In any case, the decision was made long ago that images of adult nudes are an artistic and photographic tradition and that photo.net would be open to them and that we would live with the consequences of having nudes on the site. Even so, it creates a lot of work and it remains an area of constant dispute.

 

But we are not going to step anywhere near a similar slippery slope with images of child nudity, and there is not going to be any exploration on this site as to where the boundaries are with images of child nudes. This is an American site, and there are too many people in the United States for whom any nude image of a child is beyond the pale for us to be open in any way to child nudity. Some of those people are prepared to back up their views with subpoenas, federal indictments, felony convictions and prison terms. A debate where some of the participants are basically anonymous people on the Internet typing on their computers at home decrying censorship, and some of the people in the debate might end up going to jail if they misstep or misjudge -- that is not a debate we are going to have.

 

That is why we have in the photo.net Terms of Use the requirement that the subjects in images involving nudity must be over the age of eighteen. Any image involving nudity where the subjects are between 4 years and 18 years old is simply not allowed on the site. When we find such images they will be removed, without any further consideration of whether they are pornographic, or artistic.

 

I think Jock's portfolio was wonderful. I am more relieved than I can say that he has removed it.

This morning I removed some bogus accounts and about 16,000 ratings given over the last couple of weeks. These accounts were the main reason that there were so many nudes in the TRP, along with causing some other aberrations.

There isn't any forum where that would be an OK thing to do, and it isn't acceptable in the Classifieds section, either. I appreciate your asking, though.

Joe, that is fine. Not everybody will get out of the site what they anticipated. How much one gets out of the site depends a lot on what one puts into it, and sometimes people don't realize how much effort is involved to get the level of response that they desire. The site isn't "selling" responses. The site is selling a venue in which you can participate and interact with other photographers, and the nature of the response depends to some degree on how you participate.

 

People fairly often announce in this forum that they aren't going to renew their subscriptions if they don't get the feature, enhancement, or change that they want, or to underline their general dissatisfaction with some aspect of the site (generally, the photo rating system). I can't argue with that. That is one of the purposes of the forum -- although, as I've said before, it dismays me that some people feel the need to keep registering their dissatisfaction on a regular basis.

 

What isn't fine is when people claim they aren't satisfied with what they are "getting out" of the site for this or that reason, decide not to renew their subscription, announce all this in the Site Feedback forum, and then go right on posting on the site the same as before. One has to wonder just how bad the problems they were complaining about were.

 

Almost everybody has a list of things that they feel would improve the site. I certainly do, a long list. But if those things are not impediments to someone's continued frequent participation on the site, then they shouldn't be impediments to that person renewing his subscription (or taking out a subscription, if he hasn't already.)

 

Joe, I realize that your subscription is still in effect and that you are still trying to get your money's worth, as of course you are perfectly entitled to do. However, when your subscription expires, if you don't renew, I hope you are not planning to continue your participation at the same level, complaining all the while about how the site isn't what you expected.

 

With any luck, by the time your subscription is up for renewal, you will be more satisfied with the site, and it won't be an issue.

I don't think there are very many people whose contributions would amount to $25 per year if we were paying for their contributions what they generate in revenue.

 

At the rate we get for advertising, and after allowing for the costs of storing and serving the "contributions" , it would take a few hundred thousand page views on someone's contributions to come up to $25.00. Actually, even more views would be required if the contribution is a photo portfolio, since the advertising rates we get on photo pages are really low, like pennies per thousand impressions. Contributions in the forums, or a popular article in the Equipment section, are worth more in advertising revenue, but even those don't add up to much financially, except maybe for some of Bob Atkins equipment reviews, for which we pay him.

 

There are actually only a couple of dozen members who reach enough page impressions on their photos and portfolios to equal a subscription fee. Funny thing is, almost all of those people are already subscribers. The vast majority of people are just rationalizing when they claim their contributions equate to a subscription fee in terms of advertising revenue being generated.

 

The main reason that we don't force people to subscribe is to give them a Trial period. I don't think many people would subscribe without experiencing some participation on the site. And it is hard to set a fixed time by which people should decide whether or not to subscribe. Some sites set a fixed time, like 7 days, or 30 days. I think photo.net is more of a site which grows on you slowly. Also, we feel it is important to make exceptions for people who aren't able to afford a subscription, like students or people from countries where US$25.00 is a lot of money. And there are some people for whom it is logistically difficult to pay, especially from certain countries where their credit cards aren't accepted by our bank.

 

For this reason, we leave it open-ended and on the honor system. The advertising pays for the Trial/Guest members as well as all the people who just come in once or twice to read a forum thread or an article and never register as members.

 

Unfortunately, our system does leave the door open for freeloaders to dodge paying and remain in the Trial/Guest status indefinitely, despite being pretty active on the site. Then there are people who are honorable, in principle, but never seem to get around to paying. I think procrastination is a bigger reason for not subscribing than deliberate freeloading, although procrastination over a long period of time is basically indistinguishable from freeloading. The freeloaders and procrastinators not only don't pay, but they also give some people a pretext for not subscribing. Why should they bother paying when they don't have to, and the site doesn't seem to do anything to stop freeloading, they ask. Finally, there are people who seem to think that they shouldn't subscribe until everything is exactly to their liking -- even though the various warts they find are apparently not impediments to their prolonged and intensive participation. I wish I had a dollar for every time someone had written in this forum that they won't subscribe until such-and-such feature is implemented or changed.

 

Oh, well. In the end, we have enough money to run the site, more or less. Nobody is really trying to get rich from operating the site, so I guess our "business model" works out in the end. It would be nice if we didn't have to have so much advertising, though. And it wouldn't be bad if maybe we could bring on another person to look after the site so that we could take more than a few days of vacation at one time, and not have to carry a pager all the time.

I know there are some people who would subscribe if we provided more, or better, means of payment. That is another reason why we leave the Trial/Guest memberships open-ended.