Hi Pieter thanks for the reply, appreciate your time in doing that for us all.
I respect what you are saying but there's no getting away from the fact this site has lost many long standing members that used to post on here that preferred the old site's manner for displaying photographs. I took a random photo of a bulker from May, it's a good photo, shows an interesting working ship at a good angle and it has only 20 views...now either no one is clicking on the photo, or the photo is being looked at without the click being required, either way if a photographer sees such a low amount of interest in their subject matter they'll get disheartened and may just resort to posting on a social media shipping page on Facebook for example instead.
We all don't want that, we want a thriving shipspotting community.
The smaller thumbnail suggestion is only what was on the previous edition of the site before the makeover, it worked perfectly well then and i did not hear a grumble about the size of said thumbnails at the time because if you were logged in as a member you'd click the photo anyway to look at it if it interested you. The click was then counted and the poster could see his/her work was appreciated and most importantly would be motivated to post more and so on and so on.... you have to keep people engaged/interested otherwise the cycle will stop eventually.
This is just my humble opinion, some might agree, some might disagree with me and that's absolutely fine with me but it's important to get it out there for discussion.
Regards
Richard
Thanks Richard for your kind words, which implicitly describe what needs to be adjusted. Before the revamp people were used to getting a certain amount of hits, which actually said nothing about the appreciation of the photo itself, but just showed how many people opened the thumbnail. Now my question is how would people have reacted if the current situation had been there from the beginning. In other words the 100 hits from the past would always have been 50 (numbers taken just to make the point) I am inclined to say : "probably not" as this would be considered as a reasonable number. It is largely the psychological effort that the numbers have gone down rather than up, which causes the discomfort.
If you mention that we want to be a thriving community, than one way of looking at that is to look at the figures. Over the last year the number of views has been steadily increasing to over 1,000,000 per month. Actually the figure I see in the system for last August is 4.4 million, but that may need some adjustment. The monthly number of new accounts is going as well (over 1500 last month), the same goes for the number of likes and the number of comments, although comments have not yet reached the level from before the revamp. So it looks like the popularity of the site is not really declining, as can also be concluded from the number of new photos which close to 15,000 per month, 50% over the numbers recorded in 2021 for instance.
You mention that a number of long standing members have stopped their activities, but there might be an underlying reason that relates to the fact that many of us are reaching ages where being active in ship spotting becomes increasingly difficult, and we have to face the fact too that we are all mortal. The site is reaching its 20th anniversary, and in 20 years a lot things can happen. One thing being that over the last year we have seen a number of new photographers that make substantial contributions. In other words, we have a fluid community, names come and go, and I suppose it will always be like that.
So the picture is not so negative as you describe, and we are still working on improvements to make the site more attractive, in the process of which we keep on looking forward to your invaluable suggestions and proposals.
