Quote from: lewis larkin on October 10, 2013, 00:56Very worrying is the implication that iStock has little insight to the working of its own computer system

I think anyone who's been following what's been happening with their site already knew this to be fact. I've been involved in taking over projects where the original developers are long gone and no one understands the full picture. It isn't pretty, and never ends well.

Private forums?  So buyers will have no interaction with contributors?  Nice.

With all these people so happy since they don't use those features, it's amazing those features affected anything. Lol...

Simply applying common sense, why would site features on user profiles, which have been there nearly since site inception, slow it down now to begin with? They didn't slow it down before years ago when they were introduced. So why not suspect that the slowness of the site is coming from all the NEW features added in the last 2 years and not the old ones?

If you keep using band aids  to try and patch potholes it's never going to hold. And they keep building on that old content management platform which was never designed for all the stuff they have added to it in recent years. It needs a full rebuild from the ground up. Removing a few low resource consuming features isn't going to fix anything. How much bandwidth could those static content profile pages  be doing to eat up site resources anyway? Not very much I'm sure. The major tug on the site's foundation is probably its massive picture data base. File searches I'm sure is a much greater strain. I imagine profiles are accessed on such a small volume as compared to the file search engine returning search results from millions of files.

This is definitely another case of typical iStock window dressing as an excuse to take away more contributor features that give the site any sense of community.

I bet whoever came up with the story to feed to the contributors that they needed to remove these features to speed up the site got some Woo-Yays back at HQ. but does anybody ever believe any of the misdirection they try and feed us? Doesn't seem like it. Sheesh!

iStock paradox...  website has a problem coping with steadily decreasing volume of traffic. 

Quote from: Harvepino on October 10, 2013, 07:41
iStock paradox...  website has a problem coping with steadily decreasing volume of traffic. 

Classic!

Why does anyone believe a word they say?  I never believed the obvious lies when they tried to justify cutting the lowest commission percentages in the industry.  Now, I don't believe that stripping istock of the few things that made it look different to other assimilated Getty sites has anything to do with the site speed.

Doesn't it seem strange that most of the other sites have spent money on newly coded version of the site while istock has ground almost to a halt?  It seems obvious that they don't want to waste any money on istock.  Taking most of our sales money isn't enough for them.  I think this is just part of the redesign to make istock look as much like the Getty site as possible.

Bruce said this in an interview about the site technology. It was a long time coming before Idot did something about it with a completely backwards decision.

QuoteQ: Someone said if Bruce was controlling iStock now, iStock surely will be different from what it is today.  Do you agree?  Can I have your comments on today's iStockPhoto?

B: If I were controlling iStockphoto, I would be investing in a long term strategy, not managing the budget by the quarter. I would firstly work on the underlying technology as it's old and outdated. It was never designed to be as big as it has become. The "best match" needs a lot of work, or could be removed entirely. The most important thing I would be doing is giving a larger share of the royalties to photographers. They should be fairly paid.

http://www.tukusheying.com/info/es_t_20130506102659.html

The big fat overweight zeppelin is going down so they've chucked out some of the baggage without any discernible improvement as far as I can see. Passengers and crew will be next.

The site performance needs more than a tweak...it needs a twerk.

Quote from: Sean Locke Photography on October 10, 2013, 01:15
Private forums?  So buyers will have no interaction with contributors?  Nice.

More likely to keep outsiders from getting wind of how things are going - from the monthly reports, for example, or discussions of the various strange pricing policies etc. Those can't instil confidence in anybody, from the investors to the buyers.

I've a feeling that Getty doesn't like the idea of "online communities". A bit too commie, perhaps. In fact, I've had a sneaking suspicion for a long time that there are old-timers at Getty who have at least a subconcious desire to destroy iStock because of what it did to their industry.

There's been a load of stuff, going right back to the "why buy here when you can get it cheaper at TS" to the decision first to hike prices too high, then to cut half of them until they're too low to force contributors away, to flooding the site with snapshots, to destroying the forums, to handing away images on Google [apparently, "c hu ck i ng" - is rude and activates the site's auto-censor] , to flooding the site with unwanted Getty stuff, to dumping the canister payment structure in favour of "credits" and reneging on the "grandfathering" promise just as they were about to get a heap more independents turn exclusive ... all of which only seem to make sense if the people calling the shots despise the company they are making the decisions for. 

Sacking you was another pointless way to grab bad publicity, come to that.

Of course, I might be wrong, maybe they are just incredibly stupid and lacking in talent and understanding of what they are doing.

I hope I can help out with the site performance. I just asked for my account to be deleted. (After having deactivated my images there a few years ago already).

Moving the forums to a new place to improve speed might be useful. Making the forums private will in the public eye in effect remove their online community.

Internet companies these days try very hard to attract and build online communities and this can be a great asset on their valuation. Looks like Getty is not interested in that.

It will be interesting to see if other companies pick up on that and invest in a publicly visibly community. Not just to attract more people to a site with a publicly visible friendly spirit but also to increase their "online pull" and company value for being able to successfully host and attract a large online community.

Quote from: Noedelhap on October 09, 2013, 22:55
I have added contact information on my blog for those clients who would want to seek contact with me.

Bingo. I would place a large bet that this has more to do with the reasoning than does site speed. They don't want people clicking out of iStockphoto, and they especially don't want people clicking over to your site, where you might offer to sell directly to the customer for a better price.

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I bet that very soon they will remove contributors too...

Quote from: jjneff on October 10, 2013, 00:20
Lobo just confirmed that the "Friends Feature" will be gone in the future too.

I used the think the old name "creative network" made more sense than "friends" anyway.  But if they are removing this feature, then Istock will effectively be the only major microstock agency that doesn't have any on site way for BUYERS to follow artists whose work they are interested in. 

The removal of the other features mostly affects just contributors, but the loss of ability for customers to easily follow their favorite artists will surely be inconvenient for them. 

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The real story behind the techno babble about code, accommodating, alterations and whatnot is the fact the old geezer in the basement who used to whack the servers with a spanner has snuffed it. 

Quote from: Beppe Grillo on October 10, 2013, 17:42
I bet that very soon they will remove contributors too...

Hmmm ... as of tonight, I still have my account there ... they could really start with the ones that WANT to leave.   

Quote from: tickstock on October 10, 2013, 21:58

They said they were removing those things because: "In a continued effort to accommodate some larger code changes on the site we have found it necessary to make some alterations to the Member Profile pages."  Maybe they are adding a follow artist button for buyers.  If buyers actually do follow artists then they'll probably have something to accommodate them.

Well, if they said they were doing it for site functionality, that settles it then. 

As for speculating about a "follow artist" button, or anything else that would be beneficial to either customers or contributors, I expect the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny are working on that right now.   

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Forums have been down for at least ten minutes, is it an experiment, or just a random blip? (No error message, just a big white page under 'Forums'.)
Also, I can't get onto my home page. The timer just keeps going round and round.
Added: Forums and home page back up.

Forum's working for me, Sue. The site doesn't seem any faster - Dreamstime, on the other hand, is working like a flash since iStock deleted the blog entries. Strange but true.

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on October 11, 2013, 12:27
Forum's working for me, Sue.

And has been for nearly an hour (see above!)

Forums not working for me.