How to turn off the new forum text editor...

We finally got the bugs worked out of the new text editor for the photo.net forums. Personally, I think the new editor, while not perfect, is a lot better than what we had before. There is no reason that people should have to learn circa 1999 HTML to make a forum post in 2009.

However, I realize that some of our users would prefer to go back to the older non-WYSIWYG system. Thanks to our crack team of programmers, that is now possible.

• Go to your "My Workspace" area (link in the upper right corner of every page).
• Under "Account Options" look for "WYSIWYG editor: disable - enable".
• Click on "disable".
• Enjoy your new WYSIWYG-free existence.
  

NEW! Easier TRP and Gallery Search Navigation!

Check out the Photo.net Top Rated Photos and Gallery
Search areas. Now with 100% easier navigation!

You will notice the "[first page] [previous page]" and "[next page] [last page]" buttons. Along with page number buttons to skip ahead a few pages at a time. This should allow users to easily browse deeply into the massive stack of p hotos that we've got here at photo.net.

Plenty more improvements are on the way. Everyone thank your friendly programmers (and buy me a beer).

NEW! "More photos by ______" thumbnails on gallery image pages.

If you go to any single image page in your gallery, you will now see a "more
photos by " box on the right side next to the comments. There will
be three
thumbnail images picked randomly from your portfolio. There will also be a text
link to your full portfolio.

The purpose of this is to encourage viewers to dig deeper into photo.net
portfolios. A user might have come to your image page via a google search, or a
image you placed in the critique forum, or by a link sent to them by a friend.
What we want to do is to help give them a reason to view more of your images.
The photographers on Photo.net have some great images and we want to help them
get viewed.

This is good for us, as it encourages existing users to become more involved
with the site (instead of just critiquing one image of a particular user's,
perhaps they will critique three) and it encourages new users to explore the
site and perhaps join our community. It is good for our users because it help
encourage more visibility of their images and hopefully increases
views/comments/ratings/sales/jobs/etc (whatever reason a particular user has for
presenting work on photo.net).

One important note, images that you have in "hidden" folders will NOT show up as
thumbnails. We figure that people have any number of reasons for using the
"hidden" feature, and we do not wish to mess that up.

New folder re-ordering system!

“You think we’re sleeping in Dusseldorf? You think we’re taking a nap in Cologne? No, we’re working at night — each night a new dial, a new knob, a diode, a transistor …” — Professor Krassman (Mel Brooks), the Muppet Movie

Another long awaited feature has made it's photo.net debut. There is now a slick new system for re-ordering the folders in a user's portfolio. It operates in much the same way that the previously announced image re-ordering system works.

Go to your "my workspace", then click on "manage your portfolio" (under the "your portfolio" heading), then click on "Re-order the folders in your portfolio". Just click and drag your folders into whatever order you want
them. Click the check boxes if you want to hide individual folders from your
normal portfolio view. Don't forget to click "save", or your changes won't take
effect.

We've tested the system, and it works just fine for us. But if you find any issues, please post them in this feedback forum thread.

What the heck just happened to the site? Let me tell you...

So, as you can tell, the site crashed a few minutes ago, and now anything that was posted since the site went live this morning has disappeared. Here's the story:

The transfer to the new hardware went as well as can be expected with just a few normal hiccups and glitches. The site went live again and Jin was chasing down the last of the bugs and incorrect database tables. The early problems were fading, the site was humming again, and then....The main drive on the new hardware failed.

This had nothing to do with the site, nothing to do with the programmers, and nothing to do with the co-location move. It was simply just very VERY bad luck. It's pretty much exactly the same as if the drive on your home computer crashed and you lost everything. So we had to go to a backup, which was created at 5pm EST yesterday (Tuesday, Dec 18th).

Yes, it sucks, we're all bummed and apologize for the inconvenience. But it was really out of our hands, we were just very unlucky.

New hardware is operational!

Photo.net is back up and running on the new hardware. This is a very good thing:

-New hardware
-Faster processor speed and much more memory in the database server
-More accessible (and physically cooler) server location

Next steps are to make sure everything is running as it should (please report any bugs you find) and to optimize the new hardware as much as possible. Then we will collect all the old hardware and see what is still useful out of it to add into the newer stuff in terms of additional servers and whatnot (getting a little bit over my head technically here). After we've done all that, we can take a look at what performance improvement we have seen and decide if additional new hardware needs to be purchased.

Onward and upward!


Image by photo.net member Jeremy Stein

Photo.net is "read only" for a hardware upgrade...

As you can see by the big red notice on top of every photo.net page, the site is in "read-only" mode for the next 14 hours or so. We estimate this to be from 5:00pm (EST) on Tuesday (today) until 7:00am (EST) Wednesday (tomorrow).

We are moving to a better server location and much newer hardware. This is one of the steps that we are taking to improve site performance. As I have said before, there is no one magic thing we can do to eliminate the problems, but this is a big move in the right direction.

I will update this post with any progress information that I get, and with a little luck, we'll be back online tomorrow morning with no problems.

UPDATE #1:
9:30pm (EST): The database export is about 75% done.

UPDATE #2:
12:15am (EST): Database export is completely done. The drives are being physically moved from the old to new location.

UPDATE #3:
2:00am (EST) Everything loaded and ready for testing.

UPDATE #4:
10:15am (EST) Back up once again.

Slideshow function improved

We've made some improvements to the slide show feature on photo.net. I think users will like the improved functionality. There are also now "slide show" links next to folder names in a user's portfolio view.

A sneak preview of the new image ordering feature.

Here is a little sneak preview of Photo.net's new "drag and drop" image re-ordering system for photo.net folders. This is a feature that we have all wanted for a long time. So say thanks to Patrick and Jin for putting it together.

The feature is not ready to go yet, it still has to be integrated with the live server and to be beta tested for bugs. But we're getting close.

First edition of the photo.net newsletter on it's way.

The first edition of the photo.net monthly newsletter should be arriving in user's inboxes shortly (if it hasn't already).

This is a new project for us and we hope that you find it informative and interesting. The purpose of the newsletter is to bring the best of photo.net to your inbox. It will inform you of new site content, draw attention to some talented photo.net members, and highlight some of the more interesting tips, events, photos, and information posted to the site every month. With thousands of new forum and gallery posts every day, it would be impossible to keep track of everything on photo.net. The newsletter is our way to try and help.

If you are the kind of person who spends hours a day on photo.net, there won't be a whole lot that is new in the newsletter, and you might choose to not receive it. The link in the newsletter itself is the best way to do this. Yes, we know that the link is not a "http://photo.net" formatted address. This is because we needed to use a mass-mailing provider in order to do a mailing this large. Otherwise we ran the risk of getting photo.net email tagged as spam by many of the email providers. That would be a large problem. In the future, we are aiming to have a "I wish to receive the newsletter" link that can accessed via the "my workspace" area on photo.net. But for the moment, the unsubscribe link in the email is the way to go, it will NOT cause you to get more spam.


Image by photo.net member Josh Root

Forum post history now newest to oldest

Photo.net member Craig Gillette made a very good point in this thread about how user forum histories are displayed when all are listed (example).

At some point in the beginning days of photo.net the decision was made to display user forum post history with the oldest posts at the top and the newest at the bottom. That was fine for a while, but now almost a decade later, many of us have thousands of posts to look through. So it makes more sense to have the newest posts on the top. Thanks to Craig's suggestion and our programmer's quick work, that is how they will be displayed from now on.