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Web address is Case Sensitive now? And what is with the ***** for passwords?
MinervaPhoto
Registered Users Posts: 7 Beginner grinner
I've now noticed that in the new Smugmug the web address links are case sensitive now... which means the thousands of dollars I've spent over the last four years for the thousands of gallery cards I've created for my clients (weddings) and their guests are now invalid because I didn't capitalize the "W" in Weddings. So... I'm going to get a slew of wedding guests saying that when they type in the website address, they see a page that says "Page Not Found."
That's not only going to piss me off, but also inconvenience my past 100 clients over the last 3 years.
I don't think this is a great new feature at all. In fact, both I and Smugmug are going to lose a lot of money on print sales because the case sensitive link thing is annoying and impractical.
Is this going to be fixed? Or can I fix it? I'm mortified
One other note-- I HATE the fact that when I go to a folder's or gallery's privacy settings, the password is all in asterisks***... really, now? I can't remember every single password that I've made for every single client over the last 3-4 years. Now how am I going to show the galleries to future potential clients if I don't even have the password to send them? I know Smugmug is trying to increase the security on the folder, but this is absolutely ridiculous. When I emailed Smugmug about it they replied "I am very sorry but the passwords will no longer show for the logged in user but will show as " *'s " to keep them secure. We highly recommend the use of password hints to help with the passwords."
Both of these things are very upsetting. Can anyone help?! Or know if this is going to be changed? I can't believe I just coughed up $300 last month to get smacked in the face with a boat load of inconveniences that are going to ruin my profit, anger my clients, and prohibit me from showing work to my potential future clients. I'm considering moving to another company if these two issues aren't fixed.
That's not only going to piss me off, but also inconvenience my past 100 clients over the last 3 years.
I don't think this is a great new feature at all. In fact, both I and Smugmug are going to lose a lot of money on print sales because the case sensitive link thing is annoying and impractical.
Is this going to be fixed? Or can I fix it? I'm mortified
One other note-- I HATE the fact that when I go to a folder's or gallery's privacy settings, the password is all in asterisks***... really, now? I can't remember every single password that I've made for every single client over the last 3-4 years. Now how am I going to show the galleries to future potential clients if I don't even have the password to send them? I know Smugmug is trying to increase the security on the folder, but this is absolutely ridiculous. When I emailed Smugmug about it they replied "I am very sorry but the passwords will no longer show for the logged in user but will show as " *'s " to keep them secure. We highly recommend the use of password hints to help with the passwords."
Both of these things are very upsetting. Can anyone help?! Or know if this is going to be changed? I can't believe I just coughed up $300 last month to get smacked in the face with a boat load of inconveniences that are going to ruin my profit, anger my clients, and prohibit me from showing work to my potential future clients. I'm considering moving to another company if these two issues aren't fixed.
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http://minervaphoto.smugmug.com/weddings/julia-and-cris
http://minervaphoto.smugmug.com/Weddings/Julia-and-Cris
It's the same thing but one link works and the other one doesn't. The case sensitive is inconvenient. Not happy about that
Hi,
Both worked for me
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They both work. BUT. Look at the top of the page on what it's named. It has 404. Which most of the time means a broken link.
http://minervaphoto.smugmug.com/weddings/julia-and-cris
Has a "Page Not Found" in the middle of it and shows no actual content. It does not work properly.
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This link works.
http://minervaphoto.smugmug.com/Weddings/Julia-and-Cris
1st letter has to be in caps.
This one is broke
http://minervaphoto.smugmug.com/weddings/julia-and-cris
No caps
I created a spreadsheet over passwords at some point last year. Coming in real handy here.
While all the changes are new and great. It would have been great if SM put together a cheat sheet for the working pro on what was gonna break so we could plan our workflow accordingly.
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"example:
http://minervaphoto.smugmug.com/weddings/julia-and-cris
http://minervaphoto.smugmug.com/Weddings/Julia-and-Cris
Please... PLEASE don't tell me this is how it's going to be. Why is a web address case sensitive?!?!?!?!?!?!? Please HELP. This is THOUSANDS of dollars wasted on promotional printing just because of one capitalized letter? Not to mention some frustrated clients!!!! PLEASE HELP!!!!!!!!!"
and Hero Tom replied: "I am really sorry, but the links in the new SmugMug are case sensitive. We have made this change for better identification/location of your images/galleries."
Seriously, I've just lost THOUSANDS of dollars in promotional material because of a "case sensitive" issue. They say that making it case sensitive is for better location of a gallery? *excuse my french* but WHAT THE ***?
So Smugmug bills me their yearly fee for the pro account (which has gone UP in cost by 100%) and then they make this change which is like a nice big stab and a great big **** you* to my business. This is not a user error, this is a business/programming error done on SmugMugs end that has given me as a business owner no warning of a case-sensitive web address to come in the near future (which also, by the way, screws up all of my graphic design promotion pieces anyway because all of my fonts are designed in lower-case and smugmug REQUIRES a capital letter in their gallery names).
This is an extremely mild case (but a case, nontheless) of a entrustment issue and things like this are protected by the law. I trusted SmugMug with my files and protecting my web addresses, something the company advertises, and now they have created an unforseen purposeful change that was not advertised. An "upgrade" that is not needed or required to improve the company. All it did was damage me. Completely neglectful from the company... and on top of it all, the multiple times I have contacted them, they do not seem to care and pretty much tell me to go carry on.
Also the asterisk password also screwed me over, but I'll get over it. Hopefully they'll at least grow some brains and put a check/uncheck box to hide passwords or not.
I don't know if anyone out there can help me with this issue, but I'm getting a bit desperate. Every single business card, gallery card, promotional piece I have ever made in my 5 years of business is now gone and down the drain with a 404-error purposefully caused by SmugMug creating a non-sensical and unneeded change that was unforeseen to any of it's clients.
So many links to so many clients are now broken. And clients (and family, and friends, and anyone else that ever gets sent a link) never makes sure they capitalize the web address properly. People just type it in. This is going to lead to endless emails from everyone I have provided galleries to over the years. This is unacceptable and not aligned with how people use web browsers these days. This is like browsing the web in 1995. This is a MUST FIX.
"Hi Michelle,
I'm one of the managers of the support team and will be happy to address your concerns. Let me first apologize that the change in the way we handle case sensitivity in New SmugMug has affected your workflow. To explain: lowercase is reserved for system pages in New SmugMug. This is something that cannot be changed and I'm sorry I don't have a different answer for you in that respect.
So, to address the situation you've found yourself in, I've spoken with our engineers and this is what we can do:
1. We can put your site back to Legacy SmugMug. You and your visitors will see the Legacy site only. That way your links with lowercase will work but you will lose any customization you've done in New SmugMug.
2. We can put your site back to the sandbox mode. That means your visitors will see the Legacy site, the lowercase links will work and you don't lose any of your promotional material. The customization you've done in your New SmugMug will be kept and you can continue to customize, so when you do unveil again, you don't have to customize it from scratch.
In either case, you will still need to switch back again and unveil your site to New SmugMug at some point, but this will be many months down the road, and in the mean time you can still use the promotional material that you already had printed. Going forward, please make sure you share links to your galleries with the correct case.
Again, we are extremely sorry this has caused you such problems. I hope one of the above two options will work for you. Just let us know and we will put you back either to Legacy SmugMug or the sandbox mode.
Standing by,
Ana Pogačar
SmugMug Support Hero Manager"
In general, I personally do not think it is a good idea to give people full path to a specific gallery. The better approach is to allow people to navigate to your domain name and there have a good structured website where clients can EASILY find or navigate to the area they are interested in.
But I agree with you - making the links case sensitive will screw up MANY customers here. I am curious if the only option to differentiate between the SM system pages and users pages was to rely on the case of the resource? Of course it is the EASIEST option for the development team... but let's face the reality- it is not the only one.
example: minervaphoto.smugmug.com/weddings/julia-and-cris
I'm not so mad anymore. Thanks for everyone's support/understanding during my venting
Can you explain in more detail what you did...where you put the direct link, etc.? I'm very concerned about this issue as well.
You can create a 404 page by visiting www.yoursmugmugsite.smugmug.com/404 then click Cautomize--->Customize Site--->Just This Page
Did you know you can customize a number of different pages? Check out this help page for more information
http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/1210637
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I remember when many things on the internet were case sensitive. Then, over time, those restrictions mostly went away. IMO, most people do not bother to type upper/lower case when doing things (I know specifics I should have stated - perhaps email addresses which used to be case sensitive) - of course I can not validate that statement. Ok, so somewhere in the W3 documentation allows for case sensitive structure (like maybe where you have to type one of those odd strings to prove you are a human and not a computer). But in everyday usage, case sensitive rules seems to be passe. So, SmugMug has decided to use the W3 rules(?) to take us many years backwards. I am hoping this is not affecting me....but obviously, it affects others right in their pocketbooks.
So I was upset about this, but thought, well its ok because everyone just types in lowercase addresses anyway, so I'll just go make all of my custom URLs and folder names lowercase.
BUT NO.
Users are forced to capitalize folder names, (in smugmug supports statement "lower case are reserved for the system...") so you can never create a URL that doesn't require clients and customers to know they need to type a capital letter.
No one ever types in (or pays attention to) the case of web addresses. No one. ever. If smug mug for some reason thinks it needs to make some sort of distinction between cases, then use the upper case for system files and folders where you can automate that and handle it in your programming and force users to only use lower case, which is what our web users will be typing anyway.
I thought the new look SmugMug would force me to give up my 4ormat portfolio website because of the improvements, but if I can't give clients, agents, and art buyers usable web addresses, that is an big problem.
As software developer, I'm surprised this level of assumption and hardcoding was allowed to make it into production. That being said, they *should* be able to do some URL handling such that if the link submitted is 404'd, they do a case insensitive search to and try that prior to returning 404. Provided you didn't create any 'system' pages that conflict with your gallery pages, it shouldn't be an issue and shouldn't break anything since case sensitive (i.e. lowercase system files) would still take precedence over user pages/galleries.
This type of workaround is easily doable with pattern matching in Apache. Perhaps suggesting that to the heros ?
Steps
1. Pull up a 404 on your website (by purposefully typing in a folder's address wrong).
2. Customize --> Customize site
3. Delete the 404 error and search box
4. Add whatever you'd like in place of it (a direct link, text, picture, etc.)
So now basically instead of my clients reaching an error site, they reach a direct link that will easily take them to an area where they can navigate and click on their folder. :ivar
yessir!
Totally agree 100% - this sucKs
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Simply go to the URL that has the lowercase...for instance, his was
minervaphoto.smugmug.com/weddings/julia-and-cris
Click Customize, then drop a "Menu" content block right on the center of the page. He named it "Enter" and linked it to his Weddings folder, where the couple can simply click on their folder.
Hope this helps!
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