The primary purpose of this blog

The whole point of the Photo.net News and Updates blog is to give photo.net users a place to turn when they see problems on the site. For example, say that a photo.net user notices that the thumbnail images in a gallery are loading very slowly, though the rest of the site appears to be working. In the past the likely response would be to:

• Post a complaint on whatever forum that user frequents the most (or more likely, the Casual Conversations forum).
• Post a complaint on the Site Feedback forum.
• Email forum moderators, site administrators, or the "contact photo.net" page.

All of these are fine methods of alerting us that something is wrong. The problem is that when 50 people all post or email the same thing, we have to spend a lot of time responding to those posts and emails. Time that we could be using to fix the problem. However, if after seeing the problem, that user had visited this blog and saw a post here that explained "One of the image servers failed this morning, we are working to get it replaced, " they would be aware of the problem and that a solution was coming. Fewer complaints that I have to deal with, less bad will towards the site, and a faster resolution to the problem.

Why not just create a photo.net forum for this purpose? Good question. The answer is that by hosting a blog in another "location", we can still communicate with the users in the case of planned (or unplanned) site downtime.