MicrostockGroup
Agency Based Discussion => CanStockPhoto.com => Topic started by: disorderly on January 15, 2017, 14:11
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Canstock implemented a new contributor website a few months ago. My first reaction was annoyance at some removed capabilities around releases, but that's turned to fury at their sheer incompetence. Here's my problem:
I had a request from a model to remove her images. Never mind why; her reasons were personal and I decided to accede to her request. So I looked for an easy way to locate her images. I noted that the release page has a count of images tied to each release, but sadly no way to actually get to those images. So I did it the hard way, which in my case meant locating them manually among more than 400 pages of images. Okay, annoying but not a big deal.
Except it isn't so simple. First, the links to move among pages only permits moving to the next page or the one after, which gets old when you need to move ahead by more than 100 pages. And then I ran afoul of some major bug, where before I can get to the page I need, my page forward request freezes around the same place every time.
Bugs happen, but here's where poor design makes things infinitely worse. Old style web pages use URLs to navigate. That's good because they can use parameters within the URL to indicate where to go. If there's a parameter for page number (or image number for that matter), it's easy to edit the URL to move ahead an arbitrary number of pages. Shutterstock, Dreamstime and others do it that way and make navigation easy.
A more modern approach to web content is called Ajax. It uses Javascript to permit content to be updated in place. Instead of going to a new web page, the current page replaces one set of content with new stuff. In theory it's a cleaner and potentially more efficient design. Except that you lose any ability to override parameters and skip a bunch of content you don't need to see. Or to go back to a page and try again, like when there's a bug that keeps a particular page from loading. Or to use the Control key to open a new tab or window for new content. In essence, you lose a lot of the benefits of a web interface. And if you're stuck because of a bug, your only option is to go back to the beginning and hope against hope that it won't fail this time. Which it does, every time I've tried it for a couple of weeks now.
I put in a support request before the New Year. Still waiting for anything beyond an automated acknowledgement.