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Messages - Jo Ann Snover
3851
« on: December 27, 2013, 14:17 »
It's working fine now - I can see posts and follow links while not logged in. Thanks
3852
« on: December 27, 2013, 13:27 »
Its available to general public now.
Right now you can't see anything unless you register and log in. Even if I post a link here to a thread there, no one can read it without registering, which seems unfortunate. You don't want unregistered people posting, but I think they need to be able to read information posted there.
3853
« on: December 26, 2013, 21:16 »
Spammers are at the new site already. I can't log in to fix it, but in case you read this before the e-mail I sent, you need to cut these guys off somehow
3854
« on: December 26, 2013, 20:43 »
In addition to the many technical flaws that have already been covered (and just to be clear, these aren't anywhere close to the technical quality required), your subject matter isn't appropriate for an application. And probably not for stock unless you're an exceptional photographer. Go and search Shutterstock for dragonfly (nearly 15,000 results) or butterfly (over 93,000 results) or manor (nearly 9,000) or sailboat (nearly 40,000).
Look at the quality - composition, lighting, color - of the first few pages. If you can't best that, then you need to work on filling some niche that isn't so well supplied. And even for a niche, you need to understanding lighting and composition better than, for example, the St. George's School, Newport image.
You should also read up (the agencies all have information on this) on things like boat numbers and names and unreleased people that must be removed from all stock images (other than editorial).
3855
« on: December 26, 2013, 18:35 »
And the spam registrations are back too - I just banned 6 who registered but hadn't posted yet between 3:08pm and 3:16. It doesn't take them long. Whatever you've done isn't catching the bad guys.
And peresanz, you're unbanned as of tomorrow - Dec 27th. I'm very, very sorry about the inconvenience for you.
3856
« on: December 26, 2013, 12:59 »
I'll fix it later. Leo literally unbanned all 3,000 spammers and they started posting again.
I'll take care of unbanning you once I've banned the rest of the 3,000
I'm very sorry, but they were apparently (according to Christine) flooding the forums.
I am just getting rid of the zero posts
3857
« on: December 25, 2013, 19:47 »
Doesn't it give you the same results if you'd search for illustrative AND editorial? In my experience, a keyword phrase limits the possibilities of finding an image, since the phrase must be typed exactly as it is keyworded.
The big win is avoiding spam. Back before SS had phrases, I had some images with "baby boomer" but they asked me to remove baby because images of the over 50s were showing up on a search for baby. Possibly only a small problem for this particular phrase
3858
« on: December 25, 2013, 15:49 »
Sorry about that - I probably banned you by mistake when I looked at a page of junky names and didn't notice a real one in the middle. Let me know your user name and I can un-ban you
Thank you Jo. My username is peresanz. I'm having some time now for Christmas holidays that I will use to work on my symbio site so expect me posting on the symbiostock forum this time :-)
The interface doesn't - apparently - let me un-ban someone, but I can set a ban expire date. I tried yesterday, but it said it had to be one day in the future. I tried today as well (it's the future somewhere!) but no go, so your ban expires tomorrow, Dec 26th. Very sorry for the inconvenience.
3859
« on: December 25, 2013, 13:48 »
Merry Christmas one and all - here's hoping we all get a Christmas day download.
Shutterstock has obliged with several  Merry Christmas to me! If they'd like to make it one of those big fat SODs, that'd be all right too
3860
« on: December 25, 2013, 13:45 »
www.symbiostock.org/community/ <--- registrations open again 
I had to mod it a bit to stop spammers
http://www.symbiostock.org/community/register.php
Info
This forum is not accepting new registrations
The minute Leo opened registrations, the spammers started again. I banned them all but as Leo didn't want to install the anti spam bot add-on made for that forum, he turned off registrations again I'm a moderator but I can't (I don't think) add users, so I"m sorry, but you'll have to wait until Leo can do something to stop the spammers and turn registrations back on
3861
« on: December 25, 2013, 13:43 »
Sorry about that - I probably banned you by mistake when I looked at a page of junky names and didn't notice a real one in the middle. Let me know your user name and I can un-ban you
3862
« on: December 24, 2013, 16:57 »
Merry Christmas all
3863
« on: December 23, 2013, 14:24 »
As far as getting the theme changed, it would be good for all sorts of reasons to pull all the user-displayable strings (and formatting; I've taken out horizontal rules that were embedded in the code). That's a conversation to have with Leo though.
Hmmm, my language barrier always tricks me. :0) I didn't get what you mean with: "to pull all the user-displayable strings (and formatting; I've taken out horizontal rules that were embedded in the code).", I'm sorry about that. I still need to improve a lot my English. :0)
Sorry. That was a bit full of jargon. If you look at the many php files that make up the Symbiostock theme, there are many places in many files that text strings which show up in the user interface are used. Good coding practice - for reasons other than internationalization, as well as for that - would be to collect all the visible text separately from the code. How you organize that should probably take account of how WordPress recommends internationalizing be done (and that is something I don't know about but I'm sure there are many tutorials and guides out there on how to do it). Some of those text strings would be things an individual site would like to customize - as, for example, the text to show on the Add to Cart/Download button can be set via the Symbiostock area in the WordPress admin panel. This isn't a small task, in part because it affects so many existing files, so lots of testing would be needed afterwards to be sure nothing was inadvertently broken. I think Leo's the best person to at least advise on how this should be done, even if someone else gives some assistance in implementing it. Hope that makes better sense
3864
« on: December 23, 2013, 12:58 »
See this list (my CSS paginates this but this is otherwise unchanged from the out-of-the-box Symbiostock)
http://www.digitalbristles.com/image-categories/
- Jo Ann, I'm sorry it is out of the main subject, but how did you get to list the categories within an Image Categories page? I have created a menu item with the "Image Category" PAGE, but when clicking on it, it shows a blank page instead of a list like yours.
In your list of pages, you should have one with the URL image-categories/ and its template page needs to be Categories Page. Put that in your menu and the code will fill it with the list - it's single column by default but it is alphabetized. Is it possible that you changed the page template?
I think your best bet with the current state of Symbiostock, which is not set up for I18N, is to work on some custom pages that you control the order of. For example, I made a Gallery of categories after we switched to the single level menus, and I control the order of that (so I can move currently applicable things to the first row).
As far as getting the theme changed, it would be good for all sorts of reasons to pull all the user-displayable strings (and formatting; I've taken out horizontal rules that were embedded in the code). That's a conversation to have with Leo though.
3865
« on: December 23, 2013, 02:35 »
I was thinking about this a bit and realized that I have created a number of my own categories - including one very recently (Lakes) and that all the new ones are correctly sorted. See this list (my CSS paginates this but this is otherwise unchanged from the out-of-the-box Symbiostock) http://www.digitalbristles.com/image-categories/If sorting were by ID then none of the categories I created would be in the right order. I'm not installing plugins, but if you use Inspect Element (or whatever your browsers show the code mode is) on my page above I think the IDs are in the cat-item-xxx class. You can see that the order of my categories is not based on IDs. And as for the menus, I was writing without thinking - the order of those is based on my menu entries, not any internal sorting - so that was a red herring. Not sure what you might have done to get things into a state where your categories aren't sorting in alphabetical order, but it isn't as simple as the code doesn't do the right thing in the basic case. It's possible that there's something about your site, your plugins or something else in your WordPress setup that's causing the behavior.
3866
« on: December 22, 2013, 12:45 »
I think this relates to the sorting being by slug name not display name - see my reply to your other post on this topic
3867
« on: December 22, 2013, 12:44 »
You change an Image Category name in the Symbiostock area of the WP admin panel. If you change the display name but not the slug (you will see both fields in the Image Category UI), the menus will sort in the order of the slug, not the display name. I just changed my category Abstract | Background | Texture (which had abstract-backgrounds-textures as its slug) to be Backgrounds and Textures but I left the slug alone. If you look in the menus it appears above Animals in the list Depending on whether you have any direct links to the old slug - in my case http://www.digitalbristles.com/image-type/abstract-backgrounds-textures/ - you can change the slug to fix the sort order
3868
« on: December 20, 2013, 11:44 »
If these were never visible (i.e. it's not that they were once there and have gone missing), I'm guessing it's an issue with memory on the server and possibly that you're using GD versus Image Magick for processing images Take a look at this thread for details http://www.symbiostock.org/community/viewtopic.php?id=666
3869
« on: December 20, 2013, 11:37 »
I'm glad to see Shutterstock opening up this type of imagery. The market isn't perhaps as large as for creative, but it's definitely there.
When I switched back to independent after a stint as an iStock exclusive, I included a batch of some of my iStock editorial images and all were rejected with "this isn't editorial", and I think they all fit into the type that Shutterstock now considers "illustrative".
You did a good job with the examples in the article - it helps make things clear about what you will and won't accept. Couple of thoughts about other clarifications that might be helpful.
Are images of children OK - one area that I recall having quite a bit of discussion when iStock started editorial was editorial images of children and I think the guideline was that groups of kids were OK, a kid with an adult was OK but not a solo child
What about panoramas - a stitched image that is accurately depicting what was there but was obviously manipulated to get there
What about HDR - again, assuming it isn't the crunchy-crazy-vibrant kind but the kind that looks natural but wasn't a single exposure
Skin/blemish retouching - you mentioned removal of sensor spots, but a zit could be considered an element of the image as it's not a camera-introduced defect.
3870
« on: December 20, 2013, 10:07 »
I don't think you want to replace the generic-user avatar as I think it's used when displaying network members who don't have an avatar.
Not certain about that but I do know that I have branded my own site with all my own imagery without overwriting that file. You just need to supply your file information in the various fields in the Symbiostock panel in WordPress admin
3871
« on: December 20, 2013, 10:02 »
There's still work to do on the Symbiostock end of the integration (you can see the problems in the Symbiostock forum thread on PicturEngine integration). I am OK with the idea in principle, but it just isn't finished in practice.
3872
« on: December 20, 2013, 01:27 »
For better compatibility with mobile devices, as of 2.9.x only top level menus are displayed
3873
« on: December 19, 2013, 12:41 »
There's an article here about the issues of modifying parent theme files that are in subdirectories versus the top level theme directory http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-include-subdirectories-and-their-files-in-a-child-themeI have it on my "when I get some time I'd like to look into this" list to see what could be done to get modifications to Symbiostock to work this way, but for the moment I'm working on getting the rest of my portfolio uploaded and making my site look the way I want it to, so I am modifying parent theme files. Always keep a copy of the unmodified file Always keep a copy of your modifications as a theme update will wipe them out
3874
« on: December 19, 2013, 09:55 »
My payment arrived too. Thank you
ETA: via PayPal
3875
« on: December 19, 2013, 01:06 »
Thank you for explaining what happened
You're not the only agency that has run into problems with new software that apparently was inadequately tested. Even so, when it affects your financial activities, it is very serious.
Trying a new script and not running it in parallel for one month with the old (to see if everything matched up or not) seems to be foolhardy
Had you notified contributors up front that that things were changing and asked us to double check for you, that would have helped surface the problems faster
Had you told support what was going on so they could have given us quick and accurate status updates once we started contacting them, there would have been much less confusion.
The fact that contributors had to bring the problem to your attention suggests you were just hoping everything worked instead of checking to see
I hope the developers do a post mortem on this and learn from their errors so this does not recur.
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