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Author Topic: Istockphoto Down For Maintenance or Hacked?  (Read 61416 times)

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« Reply #175 on: November 29, 2011, 16:49 »
0
If I remember correctly, live sales reporting (as in instant updates to the stats page) did not break, it was discontinued because it consumed too many resources. That was a long, long time ago.


ShadySue

  • There is a crack in everything
« Reply #176 on: November 29, 2011, 16:53 »
0
Many searches are sprinkled with totally unrelated items.
I'm still wondering if that's a 'feature' rather than a fault.
Years ago a long ex-contributor emailled me to suggest I should do that in my lightboxes, apparently to show buyers I do different sorts of stuff. It's an established marketing ploy with a name, (I Googled it at the time, but of course, I can't remember it now.)

« Reply #177 on: November 29, 2011, 17:12 »
0
Many searches are sprinkled with totally unrelated items.
I'm still wondering if that's a 'feature' rather than a fault.
Years ago a long ex-contributor emailled me to suggest I should do that in my lightboxes, apparently to show buyers I do different sorts of stuff. It's an established marketing ploy with a name, (I Googled it at the time, but of course, I can't remember it now.)

If iStock thinks that they can get people who search for tropical beach to buy a picture of an isolated dog, empty car trunk or a home thermostat, they're even more delusional than I give them credit for :)

« Reply #178 on: November 29, 2011, 17:16 »
0
If I remember correctly, live sales reporting (as in instant updates to the stats page) did not break, it was discontinued because it consumed too many resources. That was a long, long time ago.
That is what I heard.  I wonder how much resource is being used by people continually refreshing to try and get their latest downloads.  Haven't sites been crashed by f5ing in the past?

helix7

« Reply #179 on: November 29, 2011, 17:25 »
0
now you've all got me convinced this is a harbinger to monthly reporting. I certainly hope it isn't. the live stats debacle is still fresh enough in my mind and it did in fact finish off the era of live stats, which never returned.

It would be a brilliant move by istock to reduce stats to a monthly report. Most of the ill will they're seeing from contributors is based on falling earnings. Monthly stats would make it harder to closely monitor the ongoing decline.

ShadySue

  • There is a crack in everything
« Reply #180 on: November 29, 2011, 17:26 »
0
Many searches are sprinkled with totally unrelated items.
I'm still wondering if that's a 'feature' rather than a fault.
Years ago a long ex-contributor emailled me to suggest I should do that in my lightboxes, apparently to show buyers I do different sorts of stuff. It's an established marketing ploy with a name, (I Googled it at the time, but of course, I can't remember it now.)

If iStock thinks that they can get people who search for tropical beach to buy a picture of an isolated dog, empty car trunk or a home thermostat, they're even more delusional than I give them credit for :)

That was exactly the intention. I'm not saying I agree with it, just that I'd heard of it. Too many of the (smaller) searches I've tried have exactly two irrelevant, but not spammed, files in the top 20.

lisafx

« Reply #181 on: November 29, 2011, 17:27 »
0
now you've all got me convinced this is a harbinger to monthly reporting. I certainly hope it isn't. the live stats debacle is still fresh enough in my mind and it did in fact finish off the era of live stats, which never returned.

It would be a brilliant move by istock to reduce stats to a monthly report. Most of the ill will they're seeing from contributors is based on falling earnings. Monthly stats would make it harder to closely monitor the ongoing decline.

 Ugh!  Don't give them any ideas!   :P

« Reply #182 on: November 29, 2011, 17:32 »
0
now you've all got me convinced this is a harbinger to monthly reporting. I certainly hope it isn't. the live stats debacle is still fresh enough in my mind and it did in fact finish off the era of live stats, which never returned.

It would be a brilliant move by istock to reduce stats to a monthly report. Most of the ill will they're seeing from contributors is based on falling earnings. Monthly stats would make it harder to closely monitor the ongoing decline.

 Ugh!  Don't give them any ideas!   :P
I think it may be their nasty plan.  'Woo yay f5 everyone, we are now in-line with our Getty big brother, woo yay'. And then when would we realise we are getting base royalties, 6 weeks after the event.

SNP

  • Canadian Photographer
« Reply #183 on: November 29, 2011, 17:35 »
0
If I remember correctly, live sales reporting (as in instant updates to the stats page) did not break, it was discontinued because it consumed too many resources. That was a long, long time ago.

I remembered it being reported by contributors first, but that was in my early iStock days. in any case, Lobo has said "conspiracies about monthly reporting can hit the bricks."

lisafx

« Reply #184 on: November 29, 2011, 17:36 »
0

... in any case, Lobo has said "conspiracies about monthly reporting can hit the bricks."

And those bricks lead right here to MSG ;D

SNP

  • Canadian Photographer
« Reply #185 on: November 29, 2011, 17:38 »
0
ROFLMAO - yup, seems so.

ShadySue

  • There is a crack in everything
« Reply #186 on: November 29, 2011, 17:47 »
0
Are anyone else's views all over the place? If I look in my portfolio sorted by age, the veiws recorded on my recent files mostly show as having 0 views, but in My Uploads, they almost all have views, even in one bizarre case, allegedly 100 views, and in one from last week, 141 views. The two high view images are extremely unlikely.
I'm sure irregular/inaccurate views is among the least of the current buts, but ...

« Reply #187 on: November 29, 2011, 17:59 »
0
Using Sean's great GreaseMonkey scripts I can turn views off, so I couldn't tell you anything about mine. I do recall a bug some months (a year or so??) back where images got bazillions of views for a short time. There was some contributor concern about whether that'd hurt files in the best match results (too many views no sales) but nothing was ever done AFAIK when the bug fix was made. Given they're pushing "fixes" at the moment, I'm sure they're pushing a bug or two along with...

ShadySue

  • There is a crack in everything
« Reply #188 on: November 29, 2011, 18:11 »
0
I looked again at the view which is showing in My Downloads as having 100 views. In my portfolio and on the file page, it's showing as 6.

Can we really trust ANY site figures?

On my financials tab, my Total Earnings has gone up only $10 since Sunday night, while my Balance has gone up $70.06.

ShadySue

  • There is a crack in everything
« Reply #189 on: November 29, 2011, 19:21 »
0
ETA: I am wondering if it is because of different laws on advertising, that people might be less concerned about this in Germany. Even if I buy a picture of my competitor with a RF license, I am pretty sure that would still not allow me to advertise with his face.

Sorry to get back to this - I guess it should go in a new thread. How is a buyer who buys a model-released image from a stock agency supposed to know whether a chef/baker/plumber/teacher/doctor or whatever is real or just a model acting the part?

It would be an interesting legal case - and I know nothing about German law - to have someone who signed a model release allowing almost any use suing someone who used it under the terms of the MR.

The English language MR says, "I agree that this
release is irrevocable, worldwide and perpetual, and will be governed
by the laws (excluding the law of conflicts) of the country/state from the
following list that is nearest to the address of the Model (or Parent*) given
opposite: New York, Alberta, England, Australia and New Zealand."

So I'm guessing a lawyer would argue that the German model was signing an agreement to sign under English Law, not German.
Whether the Law of Conflicts would come into play, IANAL. But it looks as though the model is relinquishing the right to the Law of Conflicts too. Though under English law, you can't sign away your legal rights (or maybe that's only Scots Law?)
« Last Edit: November 29, 2011, 20:11 by ShadySue »

jbarber873

« Reply #190 on: November 29, 2011, 20:01 »
0
Many searches are sprinkled with totally unrelated items.
I'm still wondering if that's a 'feature' rather than a fault.
Years ago a long ex-contributor emailled me to suggest I should do that in my lightboxes, apparently to show buyers I do different sorts of stuff. It's an established marketing ploy with a name, (I Googled it at the time, but of course, I can't remember it now.)

If iStock thinks that they can get people who search for tropical beach to buy a picture of an isolated dog, empty car trunk or a home thermostat, they're even more delusional than I give them credit for :)

That was exactly the intention. I'm not saying I agree with it, just that I'd heard of it. Too many of the (smaller) searches I've tried have exactly two irrelevant, but not spammed, files in the top 20.

    Now that you mention it, I have been seeing that lately as well. I only noticed one file in each search that I can recall, but I remember thinking that this shot has no place in this search. When I looked at the keywords, they were all correct. It didn't make sense, and certainly would not have made me abandon my search and look for a totally unrelated image. I doubt that it would be effective in causing additional sales. As for putting it in a lightbox, that would seem to me to make the lightbox look unprofessional. If they like the look of your work, then they would look at the portfolio, I would think. This whole thing strikes me as just more incompetence by the site engineers.

« Reply #191 on: November 29, 2011, 20:28 »
0
deleted and sent as site mail. I think this would be too much off topic.
« Last Edit: November 29, 2011, 21:51 by cobalt »

« Reply #192 on: November 30, 2011, 11:38 »
0
Posted By joyze:

We are aware there are a number of bugs that are affecting contributors. Some of them are being worked on as I type and others are queued up to be addressed. Here is an update on the two major ones that are being worked on right now.


1. Royalty adjustments for the royalty issue we had two weeks ago - We've just received the reports from BI with all of the data. As you can imagine this was a task in itself to go through every download, look at the credits used, determine what value each credit was at, then work out the royalty rate etc. Our next step is to create a script that will email each contributor affected with a list of each download and what royalty is due for that download. Then we'll add the royalty owed as a bulk to your account. We are estimating this to occur on Tuesday of next week.


2. The 'My Uploads' page - The dev team is working on this one as well. However, they are holding off on fixing this until they get all of the bugs worked out of the DB release we did this past weekend. They don't want to create a fix on a system that is still being tweaked and adjusted. They have promised me however, that their goal is to have this bug fixed by end of next week as well.

Am I correct in interpreting the highlighted statements above ... joyze is implying that the IT team, instead of doing software development, is actually doing a lot of extremely menial bookkeeping work.  Apparently they are reading through reams of financial transactions and manually correcting them (with pencil and paper? and then updating a spreadsheet or database by hand?) ... and until they finish this menial job, they won't be allowed to actually do what they were hired to do, namely to write, test, and deploy software.

Another possible implication is that the "My Uploads" page is broken because they have a problem calculating royalties, and therefore they don't want to show anyone the specific sales per image - because if they did, contributors could immediately see that the wrong royalty rate was being used.  So when you see your "Balance" ticking upward, it may be based on the wrong royalty rate ... and they don't want you to know that until they have finished their manual corrections of the royalty rates AND THEN gotten around to "fixing the scripts".  Just speculating ...

BTW a question for IT nerds ... how could the "scripts" i.e. the programs be at fault for a royalty rate screwup.  Wouldn't the royalty rates be "data" provided by the business side of the company, which is fed into a script or program provided by the programmers and deployed by the IT operations people?  Did the scripts revert to the basic rate because the data inputs specifying the actual rates were missing or corrupted?  Or did someone provide the wrong data?

Question No. 2 for IT'ers ... does the referral to using "scripts" imply that they are using a fairly primitive programming environment?  E.g. based on Perl or some other relatively old technology.  I have no direct experience in it but I've heard people claiming that web sites based on massive amounts of Perl scripts are bound to fail eventually because of un-maintainability.  Especially when the scripts have become more and more loaded with "features" ... presumably in this case with a lot of complicated rules for prices and commissions.

« Reply #193 on: November 30, 2011, 11:59 »
0
If I remember correctly, live sales reporting (as in instant updates to the stats page) did not break, it was discontinued because it consumed too many resources. That was a long, long time ago.
That is what I heard.  I wonder how much resource is being used by people continually refreshing to try and get their latest downloads.  Haven't sites been crashed by f5ing in the past?

actually it was first "put on hold" while they worked on fixing the resource issue.  since they failed at doing that, they waited long enough for some other issue to get everyone talking about and decided to just leave the live stats turned off permanently.  now we all just accept it as a fact of life. 

« Reply #194 on: November 30, 2011, 12:02 »
0
Posted By joyze:

We are aware there are a number of bugs that are affecting contributors. Some of them are being worked on as I type and others are queued up to be addressed. Here is an update on the two major ones that are being worked on right now.


1. Royalty adjustments for the royalty issue we had two weeks ago - We've just received the reports from BI with all of the data. As you can imagine this was a task in itself to go through every download, look at the credits used, determine what value each credit was at, then work out the royalty rate etc. Our next step is to create a script that will email each contributor affected with a list of each download and what royalty is due for that download. Then we'll add the royalty owed as a bulk to your account. We are estimating this to occur on Tuesday of next week.


2. The 'My Uploads' page - The dev team is working on this one as well. However, they are holding off on fixing this until they get all of the bugs worked out of the DB release we did this past weekend. They don't want to create a fix on a system that is still being tweaked and adjusted. They have promised me however, that their goal is to have this bug fixed by end of next week as well.

Am I correct in interpreting the highlighted statements above ... joyze is implying that the IT team, instead of doing software development, is actually doing a lot of extremely menial bookkeeping work.  Apparently they are reading through reams of financial transactions and manually correcting them (with pencil and paper? and then updating a spreadsheet or database by hand?) ... and until they finish this menial job, they won't be allowed to actually do what they were hired to do, namely to write, test, and deploy software.

Another possible implication is that the "My Uploads" page is broken because they have a problem calculating royalties, and therefore they don't want to show anyone the specific sales per image - because if they did, contributors could immediately see that the wrong royalty rate was being used.  So when you see your "Balance" ticking upward, it may be based on the wrong royalty rate ... and they don't want you to know that until they have finished their manual corrections of the royalty rates AND THEN gotten around to "fixing the scripts".  Just speculating ...

BTW a question for IT nerds ... how could the "scripts" i.e. the programs be at fault for a royalty rate screwup.  Wouldn't the royalty rates be "data" provided by the business side of the company, which is fed into a script or program provided by the programmers and deployed by the IT operations people?  Did the scripts revert to the basic rate because the data inputs specifying the actual rates were missing or corrupted?  Or did someone provide the wrong data?

Question No. 2 for IT'ers ... does the referral to using "scripts" imply that they are using a fairly primitive programming environment?  E.g. based on Perl or some other relatively old technology.  I have no direct experience in it but I've heard people claiming that web sites based on massive amounts of Perl scripts are bound to fail eventually because of un-maintainability.  Especially when the scripts have become more and more loaded with "features" ... presumably in this case with a lot of complicated rules for prices and commissions.

the data is all in a database, so they need the technical savvy folks to be able to comb through the data, using queries and searches on the database,  and pull out the relevant stuff. I dont' think they are actually using paper ledgers for this, so it's not really bookkeeping per se, but it is dealing with our financial data.  

a 'script' in this sense is just a generic term for any sort of program that will automate the process. I wouldn't get jumpy about them doing something primitive.  it sounds like they need to create an automated process to send us all emails that will pull our specific data from the database and give us our stats.

« Reply #195 on: November 30, 2011, 12:19 »
0
Just noticed I can retrieve one up-to-date number.  On the stats page, "Regular downloads by file type (updated daily)" appears to be current.  I have 7 more sales reported there than under the downloads section.

« Reply #196 on: November 30, 2011, 12:23 »
0


BTW a question for IT nerds ... how could the "scripts" i.e. the programs be at fault for a royalty rate screwup.  Wouldn't the royalty rates be "data" provided by the business side of the company, which is fed into a script or program provided by the programmers and deployed by the IT operations people?  Did the scripts revert to the basic rate because the data inputs specifying the actual rates were missing or corrupted?  Or did someone provide the wrong data?

Question No. 2 for IT'ers ... does the referral to using "scripts" imply that they are using a fairly primitive programming environment?  E.g. based on Perl or some other relatively old technology.  I have no direct experience in it but I've heard people claiming that web sites based on massive amounts of Perl scripts are bound to fail eventually because of un-maintainability.  Especially when the scripts have become more and more loaded with "features" ... presumably in this case with a lot of complicated rules for prices and commissions.

Among non-technical people, 'scripts' is simply becoming  common slang term for code of any sort, that drives a web site.  'Script' has a specific meaning in software development, referring to 'interpreted' programming languages, but that distinction is being lost.   I think this usage emanates from the UK but I'm not sure.  Yes, there's a clear distinction between code and data, which should be maintained, but in the Byzantine world of iStock's ever-changing business model, royalties are calculated by formulas of unknown complexity, in code ('scripts').
« Last Edit: November 30, 2011, 13:28 by stockastic »

« Reply #197 on: November 30, 2011, 12:49 »
0
Just noticed I can retrieve one up-to-date number.  On the stats page, "Regular downloads by file type (updated daily)" appears to be current.  I have 7 more sales reported there than under the downloads section.

I suspect that that discrepancy may be due to not having yet had yesterday's sales added to the Stats (mine aren't anyway).

« Reply #198 on: November 30, 2011, 13:39 »
0
Just noticed I can retrieve one up-to-date number.  On the stats page, "Regular downloads by file type (updated daily)" appears to be current.  I have 7 more sales reported there than under the downloads section.

I suspect that that discrepancy may be due to not having yet had yesterday's sales added to the Stats (mine aren't anyway).

Yep...that's what I was thinking.  Nevertheless, it's nice to at least have one number acting properly.

SNP

  • Canadian Photographer
« Reply #199 on: November 30, 2011, 16:24 »
0
I had to try three times to log in just now. kept getting the "whoops" page. and sales are abysmal if balance is any indicator. so now I don't even know if I am getting sales. I should have more than half my days worth of downloads by now. brutal.
« Last Edit: November 30, 2011, 16:46 by SNP »


 

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