as Leo closed the symbiostock-forum before giving change to say bye to each other, i use this message to do so:

greetings to all those with whom I had nice digital contacts in the past year

S�ndor G�ra
www.sangostock.com

Unfortunately, a lot of us found the forum had disappeared before we even knew anything was up.

It was a great group of supportive colleagues who came together around Symbiostock over the last year. Many became friends. I will miss that community a lot.

You're all welcome to join us on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1413060825613141/

Yes! It's a great place for Symbiostockers to gather and continue to help one another as needed. Thanks, Michele, for creating that group on FB several months ago.

maybe closing the forum was a result of his poll wanting us to pay him 10 bucks a month for updates?

Yes,  the poll was showing only about 11 votes, 2 supporting the idea of a monthly fee and 9 against it (if I remember well the figures). At this point the poll was closed and a long bye-bye message was posted by Leo. A couple of days after the forum has gone...

what was the "gist" of his bye message for those of us that missed it?

Here's what Leo has on his own site:

http://www.clipartillustration.com/symbiostock-beginning-to-end/

So the (very rough) summary of things as I saw them (and I may have missed bits as I haven't spent much time in that forum of late):

Leo had a new system in the works, plus a "transition" release to help people get there - but for the transition you dropped any child theme and all the sites would look the same. Not sure what the work would be to move an existing site to the transition as I didn't take that release.

There's a link to a latest release available from GitHub posted elsewhere on Leo's site, but again, I don't know what version or if that supports child themes or not

http://www.clipartillustration.com/symbiostock/

In the now-defunct forum, Leo had a poll to vote on whether people would pay $10 a month to get updates automatically on their new sites. I wasn't completely clear on the alternative, but I think the new code would be available free if you did the updates and maintenance yourself.

Although there are 180 sites, after getting 9 no and 2 yes votes on the poll, Leo declared everything over and he'd be shuttering the forums in 7 days.

A day or so later I saw a post that said he'd been contacted by several people who hadn't had a chance to vote. There was also a comment about the possibility of some alternative to $10 a month - a percentage of sales. Leo said he was bowing out although he might make fixes available as needed (because he'd be keeping his own site up and running) but the forums could stay up for site owners to support one another. But then the forums went dark a day or so later. I didn't see anything (e-mail or forum) that explained why he'd changed his mind about leaving the forums around.

There was a lot of useful information in those forums - long posts, code snippets and how-tos, tutorials, etc. Lots of people spent lots of time putting all of that together. I don't know much about hosting a forum, but I'd have guessed one of us with hosting could have taken that over to keep it available for all of us to use.

As Michele says, there's the Facebook group - good for keeping in touch, although minus all that stored information in the forums...

...I'm happy to see you've found a place to put the microstock community at lesser expense ...

But we have no tutorials, how-to's, code snippets or other advice that is now unavailable as the forums have gone.

Is there some way that information can be handed on to one of us with a place to host it? For as long as there are sites running with the existing code, that information (lots of it anyway) is really useful...

Regarding tutorials, I'll export those forums and perhaps someone can set up an easily sustainable wordpress.com blog or something...just posting things to it. Let me find a phpbb-to-something converter and I'll hand it over to someone when I get a chance.

Meanwhile I've got a project on the islands here which seems fairly well aimed and intelligent plus a few illustration jobs. If things come back together, perhaps I'll have a little more fuel to finish the symbio-related projects.

Thanks for the update, guys.

Hope things improve for Leo.

Russell

Hey guys, a small update.

I'm departing from Microstock for a while by necessity. I'm happy to see you've found a place to put the microstock community at lesser expense where you can also play farmville.  If that is not a good sign, I don't know what is!

I've simply removed a few dead-weights until I can afford the hobby again. Besides that I'm fairly certain nobody liked the .com address, and when I finally felt comfortable to remove the .org, it had not been used in 5 days (other than responding to something I posted).

I'm a creative person, and I can see a very good opportunity here for the group. This really is a time to make this thing truly invincible. Part of making this indestructible was by minimizing dependencies. Even its dependency on me is not as strong as it seems.

As mentioned, I still have to update my own site, so I'll be turning out updates as they are needed as I have with Christos (two years before I started this Symbio-thing). If you guys are happy to set up camp at facebook, I'll update the theme links to lead there for the community. Github is the place to get the latest as always.

Personally I see this as a wonderful, magnificent move forward. I'll open things up again after I recover here on my end. Believe me, there is a lot to recover from on this end. Think of working almost exclusively on Symbiostock for 2 years with 6k profit (thats not much for almost two years) and making no uploads or investments in other areas. Believe me, its only the tip of the iceburg you guys are seeing. On my end its a red alert emergency. Think of "supporters" publicly flogging you 1 year into it (for lack of sales), and watching everything sink into limbo, and network growth go from exponential to accidental.

There has to be a saying for photographers and illustrators: "If you can survive in Microstock, you can survive anywhere!"

Also I'm moving the collective to a place where it can survive on its own, and someone else will be watching over it.

I've also enjoyed the friendships made through this project. Here's to hoping I can return to it eventually. I have a few symbio-projects almost done which I can release when I've recovered our situation.

Leo

I can understand that is unprofitable or all too much!
What I can not understand is why not talk about the whole in order to find a solution.
"Shutting down overnight" is superfluous and only destroys trust with interested parties.

Tror and R2D2, I can appreciate what both of you are saying. I haven't told this community the whole issue, so people must be stuck with overly simplistic assumptions.

Reasonably you have to give this thing some credit. Before I took some initiative, people would deal with their microstock problems by writing 20 page forum threads. After, people will revert back to that. I love how intelligent people sound in these forums. This place never lacks an audience. If anyone does pick up where Symbio left off, they will have learned from my mistakes. Sort of like how social networks learned from MySpace.

I coded up some good systems for the Microstock Initiative...it took. But also profitless. I'm handing it over to chromaco who has the time and resources to keep it running.

As an illustrator this is a slowly dying business. As a developer, all the more so. If we are talking about "business decisions" I believe at this point the best business decision would have been to never make Symbiostock. If others thought it was a great business decision, I would have had qualified developers or financiers clawing their way in, but everyone knew what a profitless burden it is.

This is only the stuff you guys know about. This doesn't count the badly timed issues in our own lives here which caused me to have to give my 2nd and 3rd best to this project.

This is Microstockgroup. Not exactly the land of understanding. This is where people come to get out aggression. This is where Symbiostock started. I'm not saying it couldn't have worked. It just so happens one of the few guys that had the ability and the initiative just got tired.

Here is a prediction from a guy you don't respect: Micrsotock is going to continually slip away with greater exploits against you, and you are going to complain and be frustrated while you claw like rats to get into this digital sweat shop. People who willfully submit to agencies which are * you dry simply cannot talk about my business sense. Its a marvel this project even lasted past a year after it was ripped apart in this community.

My first reply in this thread reflects business sense you'd do well to consider: I'm getting out of microstock.

Tror and R2D2, I can appreciate what both of you are saying. I haven't told this community the whole issue, so people must be stuck with overly simplistic assumptions.

Reasonably you have to give this thing some credit. Before I took some initiative, people would deal with their microstock problems by writing 20 page forum threads. After, people will revert back to that. I love how intelligent people sound in these forums. This place never lacks an audience. If anyone does pick up where Symbio left off, they will have learned from my mistakes. Sort of like how social networks learned from MySpace.

I coded up some good systems for the Microstock Initiative...it took. But also profitless. I'm handing it over to chromaco who has the time and resources to keep it running.

As an illustrator this is a slowly dying business. As a developer, all the more so. If we are talking about "business decisions" I believe at this point the best business decision would have been to never make Symbiostock. If others thought it was a great business decision, I would have had qualified developers or financiers clawing their way in, but everyone knew what a profitless burden it is.

This is only the stuff you guys know about. This doesn't count the badly timed issues in our own lives here which caused me to have to give my 2nd and 3rd best to this project.

This is Microstockgroup. Not exactly the land of understanding. This is where people come to get out aggression. This is where Symbiostock started. I'm not saying it couldn't have worked. It just so happens one of the few guys that had the ability and the initiative just got tired.

Here is a prediction from a guy you don't respect: Micrsotock is going to continually slip away with greater exploits against you, and you are going to complain and be frustrated while you claw like rats to get into this digital sweat shop. People who willfully submit to agencies which are * you dry simply cannot talk about my business sense. Its a marvel this project even lasted past a year after it was ripped apart in this community.

My first reply in this thread reflects business sense you'd do well to consider: I'm getting out of microstock.

Leo, I am not part of Symbiostock but I respect you for working on a bold solution.  I can understand
How such a project could drain anybodys time and resources.  You can be proud of your talent and effort.   Wish you the best in what ever you are going to be doing in future.

Quote from: Magnetic on July 05, 2014, 13:28

As an illustrator this is a slowly dying business. As a developer, all the more so. If we are talking about "business decisions" I believe at this point the best business decision would have been to never make Symbiostock. If others thought it was a great business decision, I would have had qualified developers or financiers clawing their way in, but everyone knew what a profitless burden it is.

I'm not sure. I was disappointed when some of the affiliate marketing suggestions got shot down by the community. I thought that was a great area to expand profits and let marketers mix with artists. There are still a lot of ideas floating around the ether, so I'm still hopeful one will strike gold for at least a few of us hungry micro monkeys. 

Just to close on a positive note though, we all have websites. You have access to the most recent version which I'll update as I take care of Christos' and my site. All the ingredients are there. Cascoly is taking over Symbiostock.org, Chromaco is taking over the Microstock collective. I'm moving onto some local ventures on the islands.

I think many people will continue to benefit on an individual level with this. It just wasn't engineered properly to benefit a centralized entity.

Please continue to enjoy your sites and grow together.

Leo

I liked it when it was here, I never understood why a separate category/section here would've been a problem.. It's relevant, and each of the agencies has a section even illustrators has one.


My Very Best
KimsCreativeHub.com