Comments on: I’ve Made Some Changes Recently

By: Scott Hargis

Scott Hargis — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:19:07 +0000

I’ve seen lots of attempts to move activity from Flickr forums to phpBB boards. Never seen one that made it.

The reason is that we’re photographers first, and the image is king. And I’ve never seen a traditional forum that was photo-friendly like Flickr is. For me , the PFRE forum is all about the photos, and if I can’t see the pool, and make notes directly on the images, and see the exif, and embed them easily in the discussion topics, then I’m not interested.

To insinuate that it’s somehow Larry’s fault that a bad idea didn’t flourish is just juvenile.

By: larry

larry — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:10:59 +0000

Adam- Perhaps there were ways I could of promoted the phpBB board more but I haven’t done anything to speak of to promote the flickr group either. Other than the flickr photo widget along the right side-bar the flickr group has the same promotion (a link on the side-bar).

By: Chester Bullock

Chester Bullock — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:40:12 +0000

If you decide to look elsewhere for hosting, I wholeheartedly recommend Dathorn.com. Never had a single problem not of my own creation in the 3 years I have had my sites there.

By: Adam no use Flickr

Adam no use Flickr — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:17:19 +0000

The reason why the phpBBboard wasn’t used is, that it was
never promoted.

Not rocket science.

Burying one link amongst many, hoping people are going to click on it, is not the way to do it.

How often do we read about the importance of promoting your photography business here?
And yet, the phpBB forum (which is much more capable than the dumbed down Flickr offering, aimed at teenagers, something I refuse to bother with anymore) was not promoted or teased in anyway.

After running a discussion forum myself for 5 years, you have to make it easy for people to find and use.

Hey, that’s a bit like running a business, isn’t it?

So, I find it quite extradorinary, and I suspect Larry never wanted to grow beyond Flickr in the first place.
It was doomed to fail.

By: larry

larry — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 05:13:50 +0000

PFRE server reliability has been much better this week. I just got the monitoring report and downtime this week was only 5 min. That’s an acceptable level.

By: Aaron Priest

Aaron Priest — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 13:26:28 +0000

The Captcha program built into phpBB isn’t real great, and has recently been compromised. You could try installing something better like ReCaptcha and I bet your spammers would mostly disappear. http://recaptcha.net/plugins/phpbb/

I wish the phpBB forum was getting more activity. I prefer it over the flickr group myself.

I’m surprised you’ve had that much DNS trouble with BlueHost. Aren’t they the same as HostMonster? To date, they are the best I’ve ever used myself.