Just a word of warning with this...sure it's easy to add, but it can be disabled in matter of seconds.
Cheers,
David
lol, thanks but no warning needed here. Any image you view on the net you can find in a certain folder on your computer, no matter what css tricks you use or java you employ. I have even used flash and svg protection at one of my sites. There is no real way to stop web piracy currently other than tracking urls and ip's and hunting the scumbags down like the dirty rotten dogs that they are. I suppose you could ruin the image by placing a big fat harsh watermark over the subject, but then nobody would want the image anyway.
Cheers
-don
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BaldyRegistered Users, Super ModeratorsPosts: 2,853moderator
edited April 6, 2005
Seems like there are quite a few variables. I notice at dpreview that some users report no problems whereas others are having disappearing images.
Doesn't seem like Slug has some block on us if images are showing up when we use one of the prescribed ways to link externally. Am I wrong?
Seems like there are quite a few variables. I notice at dpreview that some users report no problems whereas others are having disappearing images.
Doesn't seem like Slug has some block on us if images are showing up when we use one of the prescribed ways to link externally. Am I wrong?
Minoltaman's suggestion about how to link images is the same method I arrived at, and my links (or rather embeds) that were done that way are still working. Again, I reiterate: you *must* type in that [img*] code (without the asterisk) before pasting in the URL from the address bar of the open image. Then follow up with the .JPG and the [/img*] code (again without the asterisk). This is to do the embedding of the image in the post. If you just want to have a working link, you can leave out the "img" coding. If you add the .jpg, you will get the image alone on a page. If you don't add the .jpg, you will get the whole PBase page with the image on it.
Hope this is clear enough...
-Jerry
Whether you think that you can or that you can't, you are usually right.
- Henry Ford
Seems like there are quite a few variables. I notice at dpreview that some users report no problems whereas others are having disappearing images.
Doesn't seem like Slug has some block on us if images are showing up when we use one of the prescribed ways to link externally. Am I wrong?
There are no variables other than pbase system failure to this equation if you use the proper url and are a paid pbase subscriber.
I realize it seems like slug has been playing games with dlinks, but he has not. Back in the VERY old days he would turn off dlinks site wide on occasion, if I remember correctly, due to server overload. I have not seen this for about two years. He just does not do anything like that nor does he block anyones regular dlinks anywhere anytime except on authority from GOD. His big goal is to always make dlinks work no matter where there are placed or how much action they get. Too bad his equipment could not keep up...
At pbase when you first dlink an image that image is copied to another set of servers, probably for load balancing and other reasons. Now these servers have been VERY unstable for the last 5 months and have been failing miserably the last two quarters. Slug's css servers also have been unstable for the last few months. Really it was/is is a big mess and a pain in the rear.
Because of the hardware failures you will get symptoms I list below, this is assuming you properly linked to a proper pbase url and not a temporary one.
1) dlinks that work and then fail
2) dlinks that fail and then work
3) dlinks that work intermittently
4) dlinks that you could not place as they failed immediately
5) one dlink to the same users galleries can fail while another works fine
6) you never had any trouble
7) most peoples old uploads remained stable while recent uploads tended to fail more frequently
8) Some dlinks on the dlink servers were never recovered and sometimes reuploading the image was the only way to fix the link
SLug has a staff of 1 or 2 people and is entirely overwhelmed. He not only does not ever worry or do anything about single links, he rarely cares about anything because he does not have the time too.
His stuff was so flakey I know a mini max-exodus took place at pbase. This exodus included some of his best photographers and his heaviest hitters and long-time supporters. To put it bluntly, pbase has been acting like a pile of *hit for a while. Heck, it may have even been slugs plan to rid himself of a few of those heavy hitters that simply kill his business model.
Anyway, he is cleaning things up now so things are quite a bit more stable then they were, but not rock solid like they used to be.
So, use proper forum posting procedures, img tags and append the .jpg to the end of a permanent pbase url and that dlink will not fail unless the drives are breaking over at slugs isp.
Seriously, slug has lost a ton of biz that will not renew over this. There are no funny blocks or bans or anything like that. It is simply a system that went south and it's taking a while to get back to level ground again. Pbase was working so horribly through the end of last year it had to be embarrassing for slug. It was simply amazing to see the same problems not being fixed month after month. Well, a couple people can only do so much. Slug made a good thing, the question is how long will it take for slug to recover and become that again. I dunno the answer to that one...
BaldyRegistered Users, Super ModeratorsPosts: 2,853moderator
edited April 6, 2005
I have a lot of respect for Slug because he was the real pioneer. He did a very nice job of putting together a community of great photographers and he was one of the few who guided his company through the latest dot bust.
Now that we're in another bubble and money is falling from trees for photo sharing sites, it seems a shame that one of the best sharing sites is losing customers to ones that will probably go boom during the next cycle or become C|Net or Yahoo.
But I agree that the wounds are self-inflicted. Personally, I don't believe unlimited free bandwidth is possible. You put yourself in a position that a few outrageously popular photos from one user can bring your entire site down.
But i think that lack of customer support/feedback during those network outtages last year was nothing short of disgraceful.
The other thing is, for businesses like this to survive they have to continue to move and change with the market, I really haven't seen any changes at pbase for a long time.
While providers like smugmug and flickr are developing apis which allow users to reach beyond what perhaps the provider had thought of. In doing so, create a whole new buzz and keep the service relevent.
But I agree that the wounds are self-inflicted. Personally, I don't believe unlimited free bandwidth is possible. You put yourself in a position that a few outrageously popular photos from one user can bring your entire site down.
d'oh, you added this after I started a reply...
having been a reader of slashdot for a long time, I know only to well the effects that a massive influx of user interest can have on a website.
I have many feelings about slug and pbase and both of you have hit a few of those on the head. Here are a few of my thoughts in no particular order.
1) Slug offers the worst support by a company staff of any company I know of, bar none. Worse than an unattended site.
2) The forums are almost useless and are dominated by trolls, flamers, pbase apologists, guests that post spam, and all sorts of political freaks. There really are only a few members good enough to answer any questions correctly on a regular basis that post. There are only two powerless, useless, always absent moderators, so there is no hope. Support is many times not what you get in the support forums, as the noise to signal ratio is something unbelievably high. In the uncontrolled forum environment they use, I see no hope for it. Slug won't even apply minimal attention to this area of the site.
3) Slug was a pioneer and I at times loved pbase with all of my heart. I actually thought one day that pbase could become king, I no longer think or feel that way. However, his vision and ability to survive with that vision through the dotbust era should be applauded. He was the man in this regard.
4) I cannot blame anyone for leaving pbase and am surprised this has not cost him more than it has. It should have cost him a ton because he did and does at times treat his subscribers like disgusting pieces of trash. That is unforgivable in most people’s minds.
5) His business model has caused him this trouble and unlimited bandwidth is probably too risky for this industry. He needs to make a super user over there, but he won't for whatever reason. He thinks he can get away advertising unlimited bandwidth, when people like me know it is not. It's not usually one photo that causes him the trouble I don't think, it's peak times, and the recent upload list, and just a massive number of viewers. If you want to increase bandwidth usage here at smugmug, incorporate a recent uploads list that updates every 10 minutes like pbase. On days I upload 3 images an hour for 8 hours I can drive something like 15-50,000 page views to my galleries depending on what I upload. On days I don't upload anything page views are somewhere around 3,000-10,000. This happens because of the way slug's recent list keeps track of who and what you have seen before. Eventually, almost everytime you upload you get an amazing amout of clickthroughs because your name or gallery appears bold on the list to sooooo many users. And the clickthrough rate can become phenomenal depending on what you upload. I know there are tons of folks at pbase that do multiple thousands of views a day and the bandwidth usage is just unstoppable. Heavy hitters can be born at pbase with this type of system in place.
6) The pbase popular galleries are a joke. Slug manipulates the lists in a bigger way than you ever want to know. It's called straight censorship...Throw some of the votes and galleries out, and see what I want you to see when I want you to see it.
7) many of the people that are leaving pbase are probably going to the wrong sites...that is a bigtime shame for sure.
8) Slug has lost his way in the research and development area. Way, way, way to slow.... Did I say this already?? Way, way, way to slow. This and the bandwidth problem will continue to give him fits.
9) In my mind something tells me slug would rather have something he can manage himself and at times I think this is why he takes the perplexing course he does.
10) I think slug has reached the point where he now is making bad decisions in all areas of his pbase business. I also once had great, great respect for slug, however, I have seen some things lately that has made me lose more than a little bit of that respect.
11) Much, much, more to say, but I need to get some work done now.
Pbase is an interesting discussion that is for sure.
Maybe...
Maybe there are plenty of PBase subscribers like me:
1. I have never needed "support". I find PBase to be simple to use and very intuitive. The basic "How-to" instructions are fine for me.
2. There are plenty of photography forums elsewhere. As a matter of fact, I never use that part of the PBase site. I had even forgotten it was there.
3. I'm there because I really like the site layout and format, and the speed of displaying images - especially on clicking a thumb. I find the format superior to Smugmug and others as a picture viewing site. (sorry Baldy)
4. I have an online gallery in order to share my work with family, friends and co-workers, and to link to when I post in other forums. The fact that others happen upon my site and occasionally leave a comment is a nice bonus, but not why I started the galleries in the first place. It wouldn't bother me if no one went to my site other than those I direct there.
5. Other than the few times the site was down or slow or had problems with broken links back a couple of months ago, I'm entirely pleased with the service, and neither know nor care about most of the issues Don has listed.
6. With only 75,000 hits since I joined a year ago, my kind of business is probably profitable for PBase, and I feel I have gotten a good deal for $US23.
Just my $0.02
-Jerry
Whether you think that you can or that you can't, you are usually right.
- Henry Ford
Maybe there are plenty of PBase subscribers like me:
1. I have never needed "support". I find PBase to be simple to use and very intuitive. The basic "How-to" instructions are fine for me.
>>>Too bad for 5 months the place has been one of the most unstable sites on the net for hundreds if not thousands of pbase subscribers. Slug himself has even documented that fact. His members document that this fact over and over again in his own forums. If you receive 8,ooo,ooo views in two years at pbase like I have, you will need some sort of support eventually. I have had to have custom mods done by slug on my galleries to keep the spammers away, trolls away, etc. etc. I have had to delete over 5000 messages from spammers and haters at pbase. If you alter your css or html you will eventually might want to use the css forum at pbase since slug does not offer any support on this. Direct Links have been a joke for many pbase subscribers for 5 months and that is also a documented fact. Go to the pbase forums and you will see hundreds or more disgruntled pbasers posts over this issue in OCT, NOV, DEC, JAN, and into Feb. And I would be willing to bet slug has blown off THOUSANDS of emails without reply.
2. There are plenty of photography forums elsewhere. As a matter of fact, I never use that part of the PBase site. I had even forgotten it was there.
>>>Obviously, I have used the pbase forums and have made hundreds of posts there last year and the year before. The css forum actually isn’t that bad and the show and tell forum is usually hopping. The questions and answers forum, well that is another story.
3. I'm there because I really like the site layout and format, and the speed of displaying images - especially on clicking a thumb. I find the format superior to Smugmug and others as a picture-viewing site. (sorry Baldy)
>>>Slug does not use java or as many css tricks as smugmug and has a different site structure. Slug’s pbase is fast, probably faster than smugmug when it works. Sometimes though, your images and links are broken for weeks at a time. Matter-o-fact pbase has been broken for 5 months and so nothing there has been reliable or fun for some of us. I used to have 15,000 images at pbase. Now I have only a few thousand. I got tired of seeing hundreds of red x's in my galleries over the last two quarters. Do you know how long it takes to re-upload hundreds or thousands of images one at a time? Especially when you have to browse the large, small, and original versions to find the broken images. Or, use a third party tool designed to find pbase broken images. Yup, a tool to find broken images in your galleries. What does that tell you? I know many great forum operators have now directed there people elsewhere and have stopped using pbase for gallery space. As a picture viewing site pbase was great, but it sucked bad the last two quarters.
4. I have an online gallery in order to share my work with family, friends and co-workers, and to link to when I post in other forums. The fact that others happen upon my site and occasionally leave a comment is a nice bonus, but not why I started the galleries in the first place. It wouldn't bother me if no one went to my site other than those I direct there.
>>>I share images for people to learn from, enjoy, as a public service, to market my companies, myself, my domains, and to sell images or be published and for fun. Maybe that's why I am a bit more critical than you when pbase remains broken for months. And it would bother me a lot if people stopped coming to see images I post. That would be a complete waste of time for someone. I rarely ever direct anyone to my galleries. I get my traffic from google and other places.
5. Other than the few times the site was down or slow or had problems with broken links back a couple of months ago, I'm entirely pleased with the service, and neither know nor care about most of the issues Don has listed.
>>>A few times, that statement is a complete joke. Pbase has been afu for 5 months. Many of us had major problems every day, every week, for months. You must not have been spending a lot of time with your pbase images or not uploading much new stuff.
6. With only 75,000 hits since I joined a year ago, my kind of business is probably profitable for PBase, and I feel I have gotten a good deal for $US23.
>>>Well, I paid slug about 150$US the last two years and brought him dozens of new subscribers. With 8 million hits he is trying to everything in his power to get me out of there and stop using his bandwidth. Just a few of the tactics used include:
a) Removing my political galleries and starting a new pbase area for politics only. A new, NEVER viewed, low traffic area. He removed at least 6 of my galleries from the popular lists at pbase, all of them when they hit #1 or similar ranking on the pbase popular 7day list. I used to own (and probably stiil do) the #2 #6 and #7 all time most popular political galleries, but slug has removed them from the public areas of the site. Politics were allowed at pbase in the regular galleries until *uck bush galleries stopped becoming popular and pro America galleries became popular. Then he decides to move some of the galleries to an obscure area of pbase. Look at that area now, 95 percent of the galleries are *uck bush because my pro America galleries have been made invisible. Yup, that saves him a little bandwidth and gets his point across.
b) I used to own (and possibly still do) the #2, #7, #15 #16 and #24 and many other all-time most popular galleries at pbase. These galleries have also been removed from the public areas of the site. My rain gallery was #4 all-time when it was dumped and my autumn gallery 10th. They still have the votes, they just don't appear anywhere. Yup, that saves him a little bandwidth.
c) All of my images have been removed from pbase search. Yup, that saves a little more bandwidth.
d) I cannot use pbase pm system to thank people for comments or comment on others images. Yup, that will decrease my popularity and save him bandwidth quickly.
e) My galleries have been removed from the pbase recent uploads list. Yup, that save slug about 25-40,000 page views a day a more.
f) My comments are turned off so I cannot make a comments or link backs to my gallery at pbase. That reduces my functionality at pbase and saves him some more bandwidth.
g) I have only made maybe a dozen direct links myself in the last year. Even after all of this I still get 5000 or so views a day at pbase. All from external search engines and the like.
h) I could go on and on and on. I spent over 40 hours a week on pbase for many straight months to build a 15,ooo image library at pbase and earn thousands of pbase subscribers comments and votes. Slug has turned almost all of that into a waste of time.
i) Pbase has gotten me published in books, magazines, museums, websites and other outlets. Pbase has also bagged me a quite a few print sales and other tickets. But that does not dispute the fact that pbase was severely broken for months, or that fact that pbase certain pbase members visibility has been severely censored due to high traffic loads.
k) This is really only the beginning of my speaks on pbase. I believe I have spent as much time at pbase as slug has these past two years.
To further document the pbase failures and hardships I now present some testimony from boat loads of others that were having big trouble with pbase the past two quarters. Each page below has about 50 threads on it from the pbase forum and the dominating topic is PBASE IS BROKEN and why is it not getting fixed!! This is not all of the forum pages on the subject, just a few I grabbed quickly, there are more...Pbase was way afu, and this cannot be denied.
And a couple of very short notes from slug that still remain posted on the pbase front page.
_______________________
29-Jan-2005 - PBase.com moves to a new ISP.
The disruption last night and today was the result of us moving all the servers from the old facility and merging the old equipment with new machines.
For the most part, we're done, but we'll be fine tuning the system to make the most of the increased capacity.
25-Jan-2005 - Major Hardware Upgrades this Weekend
This weekend we perform a variety of hardware upgrades and replacements to improve site performance. Much of the equipment is brand new which we've been installing and testing over the last few months.
Some of the existing equipment will need to be physically moved which will cause some downtime.
We expect the process to begin at roughly 08:00 UTC (03:00 EST) on 29-Jan-2005 with about two hours during which the site will be mostly offline. This will be followed by a longer period of time where the site should be mostly functional, but new uploads, editing of galleries, or new accounts won't be possible until we're sure all the new equipment is working properly.
We're aware of the current problem with some broken images. We will be able to finish cleaning this up after the above upgrades.
The planning, installation, and testing of new hardware has consumed much time in the last few months.
We'll be moving forward with more visible features soon after.
__________________
Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2005 8:59 pm Post subject: No Charge for December or January. For those of you who did not get the email:
We did not charge for December or January. If you view your account status, you will find that we did not deduct any credits for Dec-2004 or Jan-2005, and these months are marked as free.
PBase experienced some instability due to various hardware failures and our move to a new facility. We are now in the final stages of resolving these issues. We made the decision to not charge for these two months because of these problems.
We know that many of you still have broken images. We are working on restoring them.
Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 11:47 am Post subject: explanation for the previously broken images. for the last couple of months, there were many broken images. a few hundred thousand images were affected.
these should be all fixed now except for maybe 1000 (out of 25million) which i'm still cleaning up one by one.
i really am sorry for the inconvenience, and admit the biggest problem was our lack of communication on the subject. our top priority though was fixing the problem.
the main reason we took so long to get them back online was cautiousness. perhaps overly so, but i would rather we took too long, than make a mistake.
now everything looks good, we've finished moving to the new ISP, and now we can move forward again.
we just ordered another 16Terabytes of storage to replace our current primary copy of images. this new system will be far more reliable and should take much less time to manage.
-slug
for those interested, here's a long rambling explanation of what happened. it was a combination of a mistake in our backup process combined with an extremely rare hardware failure, and the fact we were in the process of moving from one ISP to another.
we keep two copies of all images on live servers. the primary storage, and secondary mirror. we do tape backups to LTO-2 tapes.
if something goes wrong with the primary storage, we can immediately start serving the images from the secondary servers until we get the primary back online.
both primary and secondary storage systems are RAID-5. this is a group of hard drives set up in such a way that one disk can fail with no loss of service or data. we just replace the failed disk and it's back to normal.
our primary storage also has 2 hot spare disks in a group of 28 disks.
on the failed volume, somehow 4 disks failed in a short period of time.
the first 2 used up the hot spares, the 3rd failed and we were still okay, but when the 4th disk failed that section of storage went offline.
theoretically, even this wouldn't be a big problem, because the secondary mirror is supposed to be up to date within an hour of the primary.
but unfortunately this was not the case since we had already moved the secondary system to the new facility, and they weren't as synchronized as they should have been.
even though the raid5 had 2failed disks and was offline, i didn't believe the data was really gone. but on the same RAID controller was another volume still active. before i could work on the bad volume, i had to make sure there were two copies of the good volume elsewhere.
fortunately i had 3Terabytes of fresh storage to copy this too, but after weeks of debugging, it turned out to have a bad raid controller card which eventually Dell replaced. even with all the hardware working, it still literally takes days to copy terabytes to multiple places and verify that all the files really copied properly. right now we have multiple copies of about 90million files which all need to be accounted for.
once i had good copies of everything else, i could work on the failed RAID.
this went smoothly, but there were still file system errors which also took days to resolve.
this situation, while painful, turned out well in the end, and has cleaned up and strengthened our processes.
______________________________ roadart
Posts: 2
Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2005 11:52 pm Post subject: I'm still getting broken thumbs in spite of meticulously fixing all of them, still way more often than last year. Pain in the a*s and it really screws up the page layout when a thumb is a full size image. I'm not buying its fixed yet.
____________________
*cut and pastes from the pbase froum and main page above are copyright pbase.com. All pbase copy and links placed in this post are put here as fair use news on this subject. ____________________________________
I am glad to hear you are happy with pbase, I and many others are not. That's why an exodus of pros and heavy hitters and people that want reliable, fair, and adequate service is taking place. This is also the reason why many current subscribers will not renew. It is also the reason this thread was started in the first place. That is just the facts.
fyi, when slug had troubles in the past many people made it a point to prime the pump and kick slug another $22US to show there belief in pbase and help slug with any costs. During the last two-quarter fiasco this did not happen, exactly the opposite happened this time. Long-time supporters have become more than disgruntled with pbase’s disgusting level of service and lack of support. They have now paid other sites to host their albums.
Once again, I am glad to hear your are happy, but to many folks the stuff I have documented here is just way, way, way to much. I can assume tons of people will still use pbase as they did not use it enough the past two quarters to really feal the bite of pbase trouble bug.
Comments
Cheers
-don
Doesn't seem like Slug has some block on us if images are showing up when we use one of the prescribed ways to link externally. Am I wrong?
Minoltaman's suggestion about how to link images is the same method I arrived at, and my links (or rather embeds) that were done that way are still working. Again, I reiterate: you *must* type in that [img*] code (without the asterisk) before pasting in the URL from the address bar of the open image. Then follow up with the .JPG and the [/img*] code (again without the asterisk). This is to do the embedding of the image in the post. If you just want to have a working link, you can leave out the "img" coding. If you add the .jpg, you will get the image alone on a page. If you don't add the .jpg, you will get the whole PBase page with the image on it.
Hope this is clear enough...
Whether you think that you can or that you can't, you are usually right.
- Henry Ford
www.pbase.com/icicle50
I realize it seems like slug has been playing games with dlinks, but he has not. Back in the VERY old days he would turn off dlinks site wide on occasion, if I remember correctly, due to server overload. I have not seen this for about two years. He just does not do anything like that nor does he block anyones regular dlinks anywhere anytime except on authority from GOD. His big goal is to always make dlinks work no matter where there are placed or how much action they get. Too bad his equipment could not keep up...
At pbase when you first dlink an image that image is copied to another set of servers, probably for load balancing and other reasons. Now these servers have been VERY unstable for the last 5 months and have been failing miserably the last two quarters. Slug's css servers also have been unstable for the last few months. Really it was/is is a big mess and a pain in the rear.
Because of the hardware failures you will get symptoms I list below, this is assuming you properly linked to a proper pbase url and not a temporary one.
1) dlinks that work and then fail
2) dlinks that fail and then work
3) dlinks that work intermittently
4) dlinks that you could not place as they failed immediately
5) one dlink to the same users galleries can fail while another works fine
6) you never had any trouble
7) most peoples old uploads remained stable while recent uploads tended to fail more frequently
8) Some dlinks on the dlink servers were never recovered and sometimes reuploading the image was the only way to fix the link
SLug has a staff of 1 or 2 people and is entirely overwhelmed. He not only does not ever worry or do anything about single links, he rarely cares about anything because he does not have the time too.
His stuff was so flakey I know a mini max-exodus took place at pbase. This exodus included some of his best photographers and his heaviest hitters and long-time supporters. To put it bluntly, pbase has been acting like a pile of *hit for a while. Heck, it may have even been slugs plan to rid himself of a few of those heavy hitters that simply kill his business model.
Anyway, he is cleaning things up now so things are quite a bit more stable then they were, but not rock solid like they used to be.
So, use proper forum posting procedures, img tags and append the .jpg to the end of a permanent pbase url and that dlink will not fail unless the drives are breaking over at slugs isp.
Seriously, slug has lost a ton of biz that will not renew over this. There are no funny blocks or bans or anything like that. It is simply a system that went south and it's taking a while to get back to level ground again. Pbase was working so horribly through the end of last year it had to be embarrassing for slug. It was simply amazing to see the same problems not being fixed month after month. Well, a couple people can only do so much. Slug made a good thing, the question is how long will it take for slug to recover and become that again. I dunno the answer to that one...
Cheers
-don
I think slug has cut his own throat.
David
SmugMug API Developer
My Photos
Now that we're in another bubble and money is falling from trees for photo sharing sites, it seems a shame that one of the best sharing sites is losing customers to ones that will probably go boom during the next cycle or become C|Net or Yahoo.
But I agree that the wounds are self-inflicted. Personally, I don't believe unlimited free bandwidth is possible. You put yourself in a position that a few outrageously popular photos from one user can bring your entire site down.
I agree that he was a pioneer.
But i think that lack of customer support/feedback during those network outtages last year was nothing short of disgraceful.
The other thing is, for businesses like this to survive they have to continue to move and change with the market, I really haven't seen any changes at pbase for a long time.
While providers like smugmug and flickr are developing apis which allow users to reach beyond what perhaps the provider had thought of. In doing so, create a whole new buzz and keep the service relevent.
David
SmugMug API Developer
My Photos
having been a reader of slashdot for a long time, I know only to well the effects that a massive influx of user interest can have on a website.
SmugMug API Developer
My Photos
1) Slug offers the worst support by a company staff of any company I know of, bar none. Worse than an unattended site.
2) The forums are almost useless and are dominated by trolls, flamers, pbase apologists, guests that post spam, and all sorts of political freaks. There really are only a few members good enough to answer any questions correctly on a regular basis that post. There are only two powerless, useless, always absent moderators, so there is no hope. Support is many times not what you get in the support forums, as the noise to signal ratio is something unbelievably high. In the uncontrolled forum environment they use, I see no hope for it. Slug won't even apply minimal attention to this area of the site.
3) Slug was a pioneer and I at times loved pbase with all of my heart. I actually thought one day that pbase could become king, I no longer think or feel that way. However, his vision and ability to survive with that vision through the dotbust era should be applauded. He was the man in this regard.
4) I cannot blame anyone for leaving pbase and am surprised this has not cost him more than it has. It should have cost him a ton because he did and does at times treat his subscribers like disgusting pieces of trash. That is unforgivable in most people’s minds.
5) His business model has caused him this trouble and unlimited bandwidth is probably too risky for this industry. He needs to make a super user over there, but he won't for whatever reason. He thinks he can get away advertising unlimited bandwidth, when people like me know it is not. It's not usually one photo that causes him the trouble I don't think, it's peak times, and the recent upload list, and just a massive number of viewers. If you want to increase bandwidth usage here at smugmug, incorporate a recent uploads list that updates every 10 minutes like pbase. On days I upload 3 images an hour for 8 hours I can drive something like 15-50,000 page views to my galleries depending on what I upload. On days I don't upload anything page views are somewhere around 3,000-10,000. This happens because of the way slug's recent list keeps track of who and what you have seen before. Eventually, almost everytime you upload you get an amazing amout of clickthroughs because your name or gallery appears bold on the list to sooooo many users. And the clickthrough rate can become phenomenal depending on what you upload. I know there are tons of folks at pbase that do multiple thousands of views a day and the bandwidth usage is just unstoppable. Heavy hitters can be born at pbase with this type of system in place.
6) The pbase popular galleries are a joke. Slug manipulates the lists in a bigger way than you ever want to know. It's called straight censorship...Throw some of the votes and galleries out, and see what I want you to see when I want you to see it.
7) many of the people that are leaving pbase are probably going to the wrong sites...that is a bigtime shame for sure.
8) Slug has lost his way in the research and development area. Way, way, way to slow.... Did I say this already?? Way, way, way to slow. This and the bandwidth problem will continue to give him fits.
9) In my mind something tells me slug would rather have something he can manage himself and at times I think this is why he takes the perplexing course he does.
10) I think slug has reached the point where he now is making bad decisions in all areas of his pbase business. I also once had great, great respect for slug, however, I have seen some things lately that has made me lose more than a little bit of that respect.
11) Much, much, more to say, but I need to get some work done now.
Pbase is an interesting discussion that is for sure.
Take care.
-don
Maybe there are plenty of PBase subscribers like me:
1. I have never needed "support". I find PBase to be simple to use and very intuitive. The basic "How-to" instructions are fine for me.
2. There are plenty of photography forums elsewhere. As a matter of fact, I never use that part of the PBase site. I had even forgotten it was there.
3. I'm there because I really like the site layout and format, and the speed of displaying images - especially on clicking a thumb. I find the format superior to Smugmug and others as a picture viewing site. (sorry Baldy)
4. I have an online gallery in order to share my work with family, friends and co-workers, and to link to when I post in other forums. The fact that others happen upon my site and occasionally leave a comment is a nice bonus, but not why I started the galleries in the first place. It wouldn't bother me if no one went to my site other than those I direct there.
5. Other than the few times the site was down or slow or had problems with broken links back a couple of months ago, I'm entirely pleased with the service, and neither know nor care about most of the issues Don has listed.
6. With only 75,000 hits since I joined a year ago, my kind of business is probably profitable for PBase, and I feel I have gotten a good deal for $US23.
Just my $0.02
Whether you think that you can or that you can't, you are usually right.
- Henry Ford
www.pbase.com/icicle50
To further document the pbase failures and hardships I now present some testimony from boat loads of others that were having big trouble with pbase the past two quarters. Each page below has about 50 threads on it from the pbase forum and the dominating topic is PBASE IS BROKEN and why is it not getting fixed!! This is not all of the forum pages on the subject, just a few I grabbed quickly, there are more...Pbase was way afu, and this cannot be denied.
http://forum.pbase.com/viewforum.php?f=6&topicdays=0&start=250
http://forum.pbase.com/viewforum.php?f=6&topicdays=0&start=300
http://forum.pbase.com/viewforum.php?f=6&topicdays=0&start=550
http://forum.pbase.com/viewforum.php?f=6&topicdays=0&start=650
http://forum.pbase.com/viewforum.php?f=6&topicdays=0&start=350
http://forum.pbase.com/viewforum.php?f=6&topicdays=0&start=400
http://forum.pbase.com/viewforum.php?f=6&topicdays=0&start=600
http://forum.pbase.com/viewforum.php?f=6&topicdays=0&start=450
http://forum.pbase.com/viewforum.php?f=6&topicdays=0&start=500
http://forum.pbase.com/viewforum.php?f=6&topicdays=0&start=800
http://forum.pbase.com/viewforum.php?f=6&topicdays=0&start=850
http://forum.pbase.com/viewforum.php?f=6&topicdays=0&start=950
http://forum.pbase.com/viewforum.php?f=6&topicdays=0&start=700
http://forum.pbase.com/viewforum.php?f=6&topicdays=0&start=750
http://forum.pbase.com/viewforum.php?f=6&topicdays=0&start=100
And a couple of very short notes from slug that still remain posted on the pbase front page.
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29-Jan-2005 - PBase.com moves to a new ISP.
The disruption last night and today was the result of us moving all the servers from the old facility and merging the old equipment with new machines.
For the most part, we're done, but we'll be fine tuning the system to make the most of the increased capacity.
25-Jan-2005 - Major Hardware Upgrades this Weekend
This weekend we perform a variety of hardware upgrades and replacements to improve site performance. Much of the equipment is brand new which we've been installing and testing over the last few months.
Some of the existing equipment will need to be physically moved which will cause some downtime.
We expect the process to begin at roughly 08:00 UTC (03:00 EST) on 29-Jan-2005 with about two hours during which the site will be mostly offline. This will be followed by a longer period of time where the site should be mostly functional, but new uploads, editing of galleries, or new accounts won't be possible until we're sure all the new equipment is working properly.
We're aware of the current problem with some broken images. We will be able to finish cleaning this up after the above upgrades.
The planning, installation, and testing of new hardware has consumed much time in the last few months.
We'll be moving forward with more visible features soon after.
__________________
and a few posts from the news forum...
emily
Posts: 95
We did not charge for December or January. If you view your account status, you will find that we did not deduct any credits for Dec-2004 or Jan-2005, and these months are marked as free.
PBase experienced some instability due to various hardware failures and our move to a new facility. We are now in the final stages of resolving these issues. We made the decision to not charge for these two months because of these problems.
We know that many of you still have broken images. We are working on restoring them.
Thanks,
Emily
emily@pbase.com
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slug
Posts: 398
these should be all fixed now except for maybe 1000 (out of 25million) which i'm still cleaning up one by one.
i really am sorry for the inconvenience, and admit the biggest problem was our lack of communication on the subject. our top priority though was fixing the problem.
the main reason we took so long to get them back online was cautiousness. perhaps overly so, but i would rather we took too long, than make a mistake.
now everything looks good, we've finished moving to the new ISP, and now we can move forward again.
we just ordered another 16Terabytes of storage to replace our current primary copy of images. this new system will be far more reliable and should take much less time to manage.
-slug
for those interested, here's a long rambling explanation of what happened. it was a combination of a mistake in our backup process combined with an extremely rare hardware failure, and the fact we were in the process of moving from one ISP to another.
we keep two copies of all images on live servers. the primary storage, and secondary mirror. we do tape backups to LTO-2 tapes.
if something goes wrong with the primary storage, we can immediately start serving the images from the secondary servers until we get the primary back online.
both primary and secondary storage systems are RAID-5. this is a group of hard drives set up in such a way that one disk can fail with no loss of service or data. we just replace the failed disk and it's back to normal.
our primary storage also has 2 hot spare disks in a group of 28 disks.
on the failed volume, somehow 4 disks failed in a short period of time.
the first 2 used up the hot spares, the 3rd failed and we were still okay, but when the 4th disk failed that section of storage went offline.
theoretically, even this wouldn't be a big problem, because the secondary mirror is supposed to be up to date within an hour of the primary.
but unfortunately this was not the case since we had already moved the secondary system to the new facility, and they weren't as synchronized as they should have been.
even though the raid5 had 2failed disks and was offline, i didn't believe the data was really gone. but on the same RAID controller was another volume still active. before i could work on the bad volume, i had to make sure there were two copies of the good volume elsewhere.
fortunately i had 3Terabytes of fresh storage to copy this too, but after weeks of debugging, it turned out to have a bad raid controller card which eventually Dell replaced. even with all the hardware working, it still literally takes days to copy terabytes to multiple places and verify that all the files really copied properly. right now we have multiple copies of about 90million files which all need to be accounted for.
once i had good copies of everything else, i could work on the failed RAID.
this went smoothly, but there were still file system errors which also took days to resolve.
this situation, while painful, turned out well in the end, and has cleaned up and strengthened our processes.
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roadart
Posts: 2
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*cut and pastes from the pbase froum and main page above are copyright pbase.com. All pbase copy and links placed in this post are put here as fair use news on this subject.
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I am glad to hear you are happy with pbase, I and many others are not. That's why an exodus of pros and heavy hitters and people that want reliable, fair, and adequate service is taking place. This is also the reason why many current subscribers will not renew. It is also the reason this thread was started in the first place. That is just the facts.
fyi, when slug had troubles in the past many people made it a point to prime the pump and kick slug another $22US to show there belief in pbase and help slug with any costs. During the last two-quarter fiasco this did not happen, exactly the opposite happened this time. Long-time supporters have become more than disgruntled with pbase’s disgusting level of service and lack of support. They have now paid other sites to host their albums.
Once again, I am glad to hear your are happy, but to many folks the stuff I have documented here is just way, way, way to much. I can assume tons of people will still use pbase as they did not use it enough the past two quarters to really feal the bite of pbase trouble bug.
Good Day.
-don