Sounds like maybe your SYS installation is blocking PayPal's IPN server.  You can check in your PayPal account if it successfully passed the info to your site.  If it hasn't it will show that it's continuing to try which is a sign that something in your SYS site (likely a plug-in) is blocking the PayPal server.

If your PayPal and SYS IPN setup is OK, etc.  I'd then Deactivate all active plug-ins except the Symbiostock email and notification plug-in and see if that helps.

Quote from: chromaco on August 18, 2013, 18:19
I think it might be important to add that symbio site owners need to keep in mind who their customers are likely to be when setting up pricing.

I try to ask myself what I would pay for this image and set my pricing accordingly.

IMO I believe it is next to impossible to determine who our customers will be, what they will buy, or for how much.   Even on agency sites there is no way to predict who our customers will be or what they will purchase.   

Once we venture out on our own via Symbiostock our possible customer base likely increases many fold - who can possibly predict who will buy what and for how much?

Photographers are the harshest critics of our own work.   Use sales histories, agency price calculators, and other on-line pricing tools such as fotoQuote to provide pricing guidelines.  Googling "stock photo pricing" will provide possible resources for pricing.  Not gut feelings of what I "think" my images are worth.

Quote from: cthoman on August 18, 2013, 16:02
So, what is appropriately priced?

I based my pricing on 2 factors - my past Alamy sales history and image size/resolution.

Quote from: cascoly on August 17, 2013, 23:45- my competition is with the microstock agencies, not with alamy & others that charge $50 or more.

I have images on Alamy.  But I really don't see Alamy as competition.  The competition is to get our images seen by buyers that are looking for what we offer.   Someone is always willing to take a little less - so to compete with agencies on price is a race to the bottom $.   

It might surprise many to know that there is a potentially huge number of image buyers that are not really aware of "agencies" - micro or otherwise: 

Ref para:  Public Awareness of Stock Agencies  in http://www.danheller.com/blog/posts/myth-that-microstock-agencies-hurt.html


I thought perhaps one vision for Symbiostock was to provide us with a tool to break free to some degree of the agencies and their bottom feeder pricing and discounting.
   

I agree with Redneck.   

It does seem that microstock prices do prevail on most Symbiostock sites.  I can't fathom why the time, effort, creativity, etc. needed to create the images, as well as build and maintain an SY stock image business site is not valued more by their own creators/owners.

For serious image buyers the actual image price is only a part of their overall cost.  They are investing time and money in searching and obtaining the exact image they need or want.  Whether they pay $10 or $100 is not a deal breaker if they get the image they need/want.    If they find the right image for $100 why would they reject it on the basis that it cost $100 and throw away their time already invested to go look for a $10 image that might not be really what they need/want?

Quote from: ShazamImages on August 04, 2013, 18:58
The difficulty with Rights Managed or Extended licenses is that they can be quite complex.  For example, a Rights Managed image can be licensed by location, time period, size of audience, size of company, quantity of merchardise using image, etc.

I agree completely.   

I've adopted a much simpler license based on Dan Heller's model.  All the legal mumbo-jumbo in most of the boilerplate licenses is not needed for most uses and could likely scare away many image consumers.

That's the reason I suggest a KISS license template in response to Leo's query.

Not sure exactly sure what you are asking but the 2 basic image license models are:

Rights-Managed  (RM)  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_Managed

Royalty-Free  (RF)  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royalty-free


I'm of the belief that license template(s) should be provided which are then customized by each Symbiostock site according to their own image license needs.   Some may want more extensive license terms while others want a KISS license.

Also be sure the Bad Behavior plugin has the PayPal IPN server thing's IP address in BB's whitelist.

If running WP Super Cache plugin maybe the plugin has not been told not to cache the customer license file management page?

This thread brings me to ask something about image categorization.

I suspect most all site visitors/potential image buyers would arrive at our sites by landing on a specific image as a result of an image search.  This assumes they're searching for images that cover a specific topic/subject.

Does it really matter or beneficial/easier for the image buyer to have Editorial images in their own separate category?  Or for Ed images to be in the image subject matter category?  Or have Ed images in both categories?

Seems that buyers would be looking for images to meet their subject regardless of whether it's is Ed or not.

Quote from: grsphoto on July 17, 2013, 19:32
BTW the plug in I use for log in is "Social Connect"  there are likely others out there that are better....

Anything that makes a potential image buyer's visit easier is worthwhile.

But I note that the Social Connect plugin is not actively supported or developed.

There's another plugin "Social Login" that appears activity supported - wonder if anyone has tried it?

http://wordpress.org/support/plugin/oa-social-login

Please add us:  http://stockphoto.apduff.com

Thanks! 
Phil

Quote from: grsphoto on July 16, 2013, 03:30

Quote from: JPSDK on July 16, 2013, 01:53
ja ja, thats all true, but look at it from the customers side.

The problem is, we don't know who the customer is ( or will be).

Will it be people who just need a couple of images now and then?  I think this might be the market... and just think about how big this market might be.

There is stock photo business analysis that seems to indicate this may be the case.

There are successful independent stock licensing sites with a large number of monthly visitors that claim only a few of their image license buyers even know about the existence of  "stock photo agencies".

http://www.danheller.com/blog/posts/do-buyers-use-search-engines-more-than.html

OK - finally ready to go on network.

MSG name: PhilD
website:  Stockphoto by Priceless Pictures
url:  http://stockphoto.apduff.com
portfolio size:  136
your photo topics: editorial, travel, cutouts, outdoors, etc
what  you're looking for:  Coming from mostly trad|macro background looking for complementary network sites.

Now the real work begins - adding more images.

Quote from: Redneck on July 14, 2013, 13:56
Another suggestion.

The meta title of the website Symbiostock.com is "Symbiostock, the Integrated Microstock Community".

Whenever someone posts a link in a forum to symbiostock.com most forum softwares won't show the URL but the title of the site which turns some people off.

Not everybody likes microstock very much and the title of the site tells people that Symbiostock is a "microstock only" network which I believe is probably not the intension.

So why not change the meta title to "Symbiostock, the Integrated Stock Community"?

And one more suggestion.
It would really be great if we'd get a 'Editorial Only' check box in the 'Edit Image Area', right where the release check boxes are. Checking this Editorial only should trigger a well visible "FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY" text or image on the frontend image page.

Good suggestions.

I'll also add this.  On the image pages, the Photographer info drop down menu has "Portfolio: #images" that displays pages titled "Royalty Free Images on.....".  The Royalty Free should be dropped leaving just "Images on....." given that many have Editorial and RM images and the RF page title for the Portfolio could cause image buyer confusion.

Quote from: steheap on July 13, 2013, 02:55

QuoteI did spell out in my SY EULA that licenses are single-use basis only but wasn't completely comfortable with that for Alamy RM

Why do you think this wouldn't work. These are just licenses and there is nothing set in concrete that says that they can only be two types of license. As far as I understand, Alamy says that an RM license on their site should not be sold as RF elsewhere. If you have a license on your own site that isn't RF - ie there are restrictions on unlimited use - then you are not breaking that contractual agreement with Alamy.

I believe it was due to me thinking that once an Alamy RM image that's also on my SY site and is RM licensed directly it's usage details, etc. should be recorded/tracked.  All of which sounds like a pain in the bee-hind.  I suspect that's overkill and not the case if my EULA spells out single-use basis.

I'm a fan of Dan Heller regarding today's stock photo business and KISS image licenses. His belief is in a bare-bones license for most of today's Google search driven stock image buyers and that overly verbose EULA's full of legalese only deter sales as a "difficult supplier".

www.danheller.com/biz-agencies1.html
www.danheller.com/blog/posts/discussing-stock-license-agreements.html

(sri - couldn't get the BBCode to work for the links)

Thanks for the plug-in.  It seems to work nicely.

While I would just as soon license my Alamy RM stuff directly on my own site at my prices this plug-in seems like a good interim solution for dealing with RM images that are currently on Alamy.  At least until SY has a way to handle RM.   

Or maybe there's better/simpler way to license images on SY but are currently on Alamy as RM?    I did spell out in my SY EULA that licenses are single-use basis only but wasn't completely comfortable with that for Alamy RM licensed direct.

It's my understanding that licensing RM images as RF elsewhere is a no-no.

Site: stockphoto.apduff.com
Host: HostGo.com
Results: Symbiostock installed and seems to work fine so far.  Still configuring the site, adding images and have not joined network as yet so that aspect is TBD.
Info: HostGo seems to be fine so far for hosting our Symbiostock site.  I did have to email their support team to make the php.ini changes needed to support uploading files bigger than 2MB.  There did not appear to be a php.ini anywhere in our filesystem that I could find and edit. They responded very quickly and implemented the desired changes and Symbiostock now seems to upload files >2MB fine now,

Phil