I do not understand where the problem is to explain what went wrong. I think you have sold Symbiostock thats it.
And once again there was zero communication to the users and thats the real problem.

In germany i would like to say "kindergarten"

"Abandoning" the original members was the real problem. But actually we were not quite abandoned (yes, I paid also for  the upgraded system and expected a smooth and fruitful continuation), there are now two new systems with two new administrators who are willing to take us to the next level.
 
Let's just say the whole situation got messy. Kindergarten or business agreement gone wrong, I can't see how knowing all the details of a messy transaction would help anyone.

What we need now, is a clear and sound way forward. There are thousands of artists who need assistance and networking abilities in selling their art and other creations, and there are now hundreds of big and small agencies exploiting the artists, who also don't make public all their information. And some of them have less business sense and moral scruples than one would expect.

Having two independent organizations offering their services in helping the independents is not such a bad thing. And the two are more different from each other then let's say Photoshelter and Smugmug. Heck, to double your pleasure (and maybe also the income), you could subscribe to both.

By the way, if grfx will support upload to various agencies, would that by any chance include also upload to the new Symbiostock?

sounds good. But Symbiotock also sounded good....

I wouldn't be so hard on Leo.
Having some design and software development experience myself, I can sympathize with him. Symbiostock Legacy should be considered a valuable prototype which showed what works, and what doesn't, and just by being in existence, it created a platform for an improved version and other add-ons that wouldn't be possible without going through the initial version (including failures).

I have seen systems which were not that designed properly (after all, which Version 1.0 is perfect?), and the companies poured a lot of time and money to patch it and falsely believing that they could improve it (the CEO, software manager and accountants couldn't just admit that there was something wrong with initial design, implementation, understanding of the business, not even adding changing environment),  instead of learning from the failures and designing a better system with fresh start.
On the other hand, a single motivated and competent super-programmer who can see the problems in the old system and can envision the next-step system, doesn't have to worry about saving a face and can concentrate fully on making the new and better system.

Unfortunately, in case of  the old Symbiostock, a lot of good will and genuine enthusiasm by the users was squandered, and the progression from the Legacy system to the new system could have been handled differently. Also as Leo tried to please everybody, valuable development time was wasted for things like round edges of rectangles on the screen, rather than for the solid core functions.

Nevertheless, just that one point Leo made here about the declining performance of large portfolios on Wordpress, makes it worthwhile to make a fresh start. Painful and disappointing now, but hopefully much better in the long run.   

Microsoft Windows 1.0 was also not exactly a stellar product, and Apple Lisa was ditched unceremoniously in favour of the more practically designed new Macintosh.
 

It sounds very enticing, Leo. No doubt a lot of thinking and experience went into this project. Can you elaborate on the grfx agency function?

Few questions:
1. From that monthly fee of $15.00, will you allocate a portion to advertising?

2. If we pay a monthly fee (which might go up), what are the chances that we'll make at least that amount?
   
3, How can a one-man part-time developer compete with IT departments of big agencies?

4. How will grfx compare with Smugmug, Photoshelter, Zenfolio? (earning potential, advertising methods, SEO, ...)

5. What is the upper limit of entities (products) on the site, still guaranteeing fast updates and response time?

6. Lastly, what guarantee we'll get that the product will stay around and be continuously maintained?
    In other words, what will happen if the chief (and only) developer will be run over by a bus?

Back to the OP.
Just to confirm that disabling "Update public network info" in Author Options tab stopped, indeed, the re-generation of the cache files from the other nodes on the network.
 

Leo,

are you saying that with the Legacy Symbiostock I can't disable creation of those cache files?
Or in other words, how can I stop creation of those files?
 

I've tried deactivating all non-SYS plugins and hoped that might help. But it didn't. Not sure what good my site is if the categories don't work. Bummer!

Could be that the categories indexes are corrupted.
I don't know if the categories are handled by some coded function in the symbiostock program or by one of the external plugins.
If by a plugin, maybe it's the Taxonomy one. You could try to deactivate and then reactivate it, to see if it will rebuild the category indexes.

I decided to convert to new Symbiostock about 2 weeks ago. I found it to be a pretty simple exercise and I also was able to maintain all my original image URLs so that the Google searches still go through to the same image after conversion. All descriptions, titles, keywords and categories transferred across and the plugin appropriately marked editorial shots.

Thanks, Steve. Good to know that the new Symbiostock works and the conversion was smooth.

Thanks, Leo

I deleted manually all files  (over 12,000) in /symbiostock_xml_cache directory
and deactivated Networking in Symbiostock Network section.

For some reason, all those files are coming back.
Are they being rebuilt or copied from another node on the network?

I don't do much with my legacy symbiostock site these days, but just got a message from my host company that I had too many files in my
/symbiostock_xml_cache

I guess these files are never cleared automatically. Cleared it all manually now.
You might want to look also at your /symbiostock_xml_cache directory and delete all or at least the oldest files.

If the main priority is the monetary profit, investment in stock company shares rather than in photo gear might have been a better idea than shooting pictures.

For example, if had invested $20,000 in fall 2012 in SS shares, you could have parlayed it into $100,000 in less than 18 months. Of course, that $100 price per share was overheated. However, if you took advantage of that situation, and sold your shares at the peak, and then shorted your original investment and profit, waited until the shares dropped to $50 (just recently), and then covered your shorts, you could have doubled it to $200,000.

Adobe did also spectacularly well. $20,000 invested at the same time, while they were still more than two years away from their foray into the stock image business, would have grown by now to $50,000.
Of course, the timing is everything. Pick a wrong date and a price too high, and you could lose a lot.
Mind you, not as much as some people lost on quickly depreciating cameras and computers. If you sank $20,000 into a Hassy H50 at the same time,  you could still have, umm, well, a camera that used to cost $20,000, and it has been now blown away by Canon 5DS or Sony A7RII that costs only $3,200. I didn't add cost of lenses, but by any luck, with a nice portfolio, maybe you could have recovered their costs by your stock image royalties.
   
Purely coincidentally, as the oldtimers would remember, just before those stock share prices took off, we were told that �Money isn�t going to be what makes you all happy.� And that is exactly how it happened - money not made didn't make us happy.




 

What kind of bugs? I always thought, they are more prevalent in the hot summer months.

Perhaps, if it is done in small steps, it would be possible to establish an organization who would stand up for the artists.

The first function of an organization representing interests of artists would be protection of their copyrights, special licensing advice, and going after copycats. A lean copyright enforcement organization wouldn't cost much to run and could potentially earn it upkeep from the proceeds of their activities.

Once you have a successful organization/union working on behalf of artists in one area, other mandates could be added on.

It is a flawed poll. Realistically, very few of the 40,000 images portfolios would achieve the $10,000 income. Of course, there are exceptions, and then there is the hard reality.
 
Another thing is that even if you make $1,000 with x images presently in your portfolio, you can't increase the income linearly with a tenfold increase of the portfolio. If you have currently a profitable niche with 100 pictures, by increasing it tenfold, you'll be diluting the profitability of the old and new images in this niche, and consequently any increase in total income would be marginal. So the answer would seem to be to to come up with new undiscovered niches, which is much easier said than done.