argh

Ok gang, it's back.  On the plus side, Fiverr moving photo.net to Invision means that a whole team of folks (i.e. not a single hobbyist) is paid to manage and improve forum/gallery platform features.  On the down side, it means that since nobody is paid to run PN in particular, nobody notices when it goes away until someone sends email to support @ CL.  W're not involved with PN since we the Fiverr acquisition, but at least I know who to nudge at Invision since I was peripherally involved in the migration.

(The root cause of this particular issue that site ownership had previously been verified in a manner that meant automatic certificate renewal wasn't set up, so manual intervention was needed.  We've now added DNS records that should make it automatic in the future.)

Couple of things puzzle me

First , what sort of organisation notes the amount of traffic on Photo.net right now and assesses that a total change in the platform/what it does is justified?

Welp, it was that, or shut it down.

 

Couple of things puzzle me

Second, assuming that its pretty obvious to everyone that Photo.net isn't what it was, has already tried a major change in software to cure the malaise which didn't work, what makes anyone think that doing a similar thing over is going to work differently?

Different intent. It was previously intended to be a standalone business. Now the priority is foremost to preserve it as a resource, and only secondarily see if it can pay for itself.

 

Couple of things puzzle me

Third, given the audience Photo.net now has, does the thought that lots of people might be prepared to pay for what it might offer to do actually hold water. Would be nice if it were true.

We'd like to have it at least pay for itself so that it doesn't turn up as a giant cost center when The Powers That Be are looking for cost-savings measures. Nobody is envisioning some sort of wildly profitable venture here.

I see my quote from earlier in this thread about Photo.net being historic has been swiped and put on that page...

 

Whoops, my fault. Matt sent me the quote via Slack and I didn't realize he was quoting you, I thought it was his quote! Will fix.

Thread has kinda wandered off course. We'd love to keep the focus on what you want to see in the next iteration of the site. We've put up a page to describe where we are and what we're thinking. A couple points: 1. PN operates at a substantial loss. It would be nice if it could pay for itself, but this isn't an explicit goal or expectation of our future work. 2. Historically, the site seemed like it was unstaffed because... it was. PN had totally failed, and was acquired as an asset sale, not as an operating business. It's not easy reverse-engineering someone else's site. 3. CL had a choice of how to deploy our limited engineering resources. We chose to invest our time into stabilizing our primary business, which is what led to us being acquired, which is the only reason we're able to have this conversation at all! 4. CL students are really passionate and keep setting up their own communities off-platform. This is cool, but idea in acquiring PN was to leverage the existing PN community as a place where CL photography students would come to hang out and chat, since we weren't providing that. 5. A substantial number of CL students either already have photography businesses that they want to grow, or aspire to start photography businesses, and/or do a bunch of freelancing. This is why the Fiverr connection is pretty cool. Not everybody wants to learn new techniques, not everybody wants to do gigs, and not everyone wants to be a pro. Just like not everyone cares about photographing landscapes, weddings, birds, architecture, or portraits. But the venn diagram of all of these overlaps more than not. We want to enable and empower these conversations. What should we do?

I think I was able to restore the relevant templates from a prior version. Let me know if there are problems. (I took out the weird "loading" animation and the dead CreativeLive banner from the forum header, but it's still on the main site banner because that I think would require a code release, and I haven't gotten that far yet.)

Ok, back on this again today. I discovered lots of obsolete pointers to dead ad banners from years ago in the templates, so I'm trying to unwind those back to the defaults. (If you see an ugly brightly colored rectangle pop up somewhere on the site today, it's probably me trying to identify which part of the page the template snippet applies to. We no longer have a working sandbox/staging environment for me to mess with unfortunately.)

Posting images using the portfolio (or flickr as I often do) gives the poster more freedom to remove pictures in the future.

While that may be a good thing for the poster, it also may cause a valuable thread to become useless when a user knowingly or not removes an image from the hosting platform.

Since photo.net is not set up to comply with EU law regarding "the right to be forgotten", I personally find some comfort in at least having control over the pictures I insert, but for the greater good of this site, uploading for permanent inclusion in the thread is preferable.

 

photo.net actually does have GDPR-compliant user PII removal. It's not very graceful and unfortunately leaves scars on the site (broken images, etc).

Thanks, @samstevens - it wasn't obvious to me that the template I changed would also do something to the top header, it appeared to only affect what is now a grey box next to the forum icon. (You can get back to the main controls by removing the /discuss from the URL as a workaround until I restore the old JS/CSS.)

Investigating, locking thread until I have more info or remediation.

The image has a .ru address. Grrr... I do not need this headache right now!

Whoa, that's super weird. I just saw it flash up as well.

FYI - we're experiencing a partial site outage, we can't even log into the Amazon Web Services console to reconfigure at the moment.

 

AWS us-east-1 outage brings down services around the world

 

Stay tuned...

I have a little problem with the maintenance of this site being characterized as a "charity", I pay a yearly fee for it.

 

Thank you. Your contributions help reduce the thousands we lose keeping the PN servers running, and help support a business case for renewing investment in the site.

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.

—Jack London

 

Are you harboring the misconception there was actually "food to share"? Fido was nearly dinner a few times. We're *finally* in a better spot and have advocated for investment in PN, so I'm optimistic things will be less bumpy in the future.

Postmortem: the original domain was still on an account controlled by the previous owner, and due to some new corporate requirements, we needed to quickly get control of it. We were unable to get in touch with the prior owner, so we had to do a "prove you own the domain" process that took over a week. When this process was completed, we thought we were done, and moved on to other tasks. There was no notice that we needed to jump through this particular ICANN verification hoop, and the email messages were filed to a mailbox that receives thousands of spam messages a day, so nobody noticed. I know y'all would prefer that somebody notice, but as I mentioned in another thread, we keep the site going running of charity and nostalgia, and can't yet afford to devote resources beyond occasional firefighting. This isn't likely to change for some months unless our new friends decide to invest in PN (they're intrigued, but we have a lot of higher priority integration efforts to get through first).

J, do you monitor photo.net daily or were you given the heads up by Joe at CreativeLive support? How about bringing back some of the old features like Photo of the Day, POTW, etc. I can't imagine CreativeLive likes having their name the top of every page of a partially functioning site. Doesn't add credibility to them or us. Photo.net is one of the great old names of the internet, don't waste it.

 

Let's just say that ruthless prioritization is the only reason we survived some very lean times and now have the luxury to be able to discuss the site's future.

New certificate installed, sorry about that!

Certificate updated!

Ok, should be back - I installed a new certificate. Apologies for it expiring, I've been mostly focusing on migrating to more maintainable infrastructure, didn't have my eye on maintenance. (TL;DR long story, we bit off more than we could chew, always had higher aspirations than money/staff to maintain so site has been on minimal life support. Will be discussing possibilities with our New Friends. I personally consider PN basically as close to "Internet World Heritage Site" as it gets, so still hopeful for bright future. Be patient, you've made it this far. ;-)