DA Photo Contest Forum / Announcements / General Announcements

Site Outage

Admin — Thu, 01 May 2008 06:11:06 GMT

There was a short (20 minute) interruption to the site today. Sorry for the trouble.

Ads on free accounts

Admin — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:19:49 GMT

For the past few months, DA has been completely ad free. Beginning soon, ads will be reintroduced for [b]free accounts only[/b].

The voting system will continue to be ad free for all account classes. This change will place a banner ad near the top of each page that will be visible for free accounts and accounts that are not authenticated.

[url=http://www.dailyawards.com/xx_AdTest.aspx]You can see an example of this change here[/url]. If you see nothing different, it likely means you are logged into your paid account.

Dubai World Cup

bhasmang — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 12:03:00 GMT

Dubai hosted "Dubai World Cup" for horse racing this evening, it was a spectacular show, started with the police band in the opening ceremony, followed by music from venessa may, and some splendid display of fire works later on before the main event. I watched almost the entire show, and kept asking myself, "where is faisal almalki"? I wish faisal was there, and if he was I can assure you we will be able to see some great snaps of this wonderful event......:) What say Faisal???? I watched it on television.....

Email Changes

Admin — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:43:10 GMT

I want to let everyone know that the info @ dailyawards.com email address will no longer be monitored just by me. That address will be answered by site administration (right now that is Zeke Smith, wemor (pending agreement) and myself). If you wish to contact me directly, please use the forum private message feature.

Solicitations

Admin — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:37:10 GMT

See the recent post here.

[url=http://www.dailyawards.com/DAForum/FindPost24179.aspx]http://www.dailyawards.com/DAForum/FindPost24179.aspx[/url]

Site Outage

Admin — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:35:48 GMT

FYI: I received the note below from the company that hosts DA. They have been having a number of network issues recently that have affected the site. Here is another outage for tonight:

This evening Cari.net will conduct an emergency maintenance window to provide additional protection and redundancy for the C2 Data Center. Every attempt is made to provide advance notice of these windows; however, in the interest of our customers ,it has been decided that postponing these actions may subject our customers to undue risk.

At 12:00am this evening (Friday, March 28th), Cari.net Network Service Teams will install an additional BGP router within the C2 data center. This router will provide load sharing and additional redundancy to this segment of our network.

The maintenance will begin promptly at midnight and is expected to take approximately 15 minutes. Service impact should be minimal, though customers with equipment or services located in C2 may notice brief periods of latency and intermittent loss of connectivity during this short window as BGP tables are recalculated. Senior Networking Team members will be onsite managing this event.

This work is being done to augment changes made during the March 21st window and to provide protection against additional large-scale network problems in the future. Customers located in Cari.net’s C5 facility will be unaffected by this maintenance window.

Protecting DA and Your Images

Admin — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 08:41:10 GMT

Today, a situation was brought to my attention of alleged collusion. I investigated the situation and subsequently removed an account from the system.

This message is posted in an effort to further demonstrate the zero tolerance policy for members who collude to raise or lower image scores.

This particular case flew under the radar of the systems in place to check for this sort of thing, but upon inevitable discovery, swift action was taken.

I want to make it clear that while the site administration strives to be fair and data driven, when a situation arises that appears to significantly tarnish the reputation of the site or the integrity of image scores, action is taken immediately.

This message is intended to instill confidence, not fear among those who read it. With all of the automated systems in place along with vigilant site administration behind the scenes, you can be sure the ratings at DA are of the highest quality you will find online.

Profile Page Change

Admin — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 07:00:37 GMT

The profile page has changed to show only the first 50 images within each table (sorted by signature rating). If you wish to view all images in a profile, click the "show all" button at the bottom of the table. This change has been put into place to help improve site performance.

Report any issues you find with this change here.

Archived Images

Admin — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:10:06 GMT

The account page has been modified to show a maximum of 50 archived images. If you have more than 50, you should see a link at the bottom of the list to view all.

Please report any problems with this change here.

Profile Link

Admin — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:05:02 GMT

You will find a link for any profile now on the profile page. This will let you easily link to your own, or another's profile. For example, if you have your own site and you want to link to your DA profile, you can [url=/myprofile.aspx]visit your profile page[/url] and simply copy the hyperlink.

New Project

Admin — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 13:57:11 GMT

Sorry for not being around much over the past couple of weeks. I was working on a different project. You can check it out with the info below.

The site is designed to work like a virtual (or online) flash drive. It lets you drag and drop files to the web, then drag them back to your PC.

The site is: [url=http://www.dragtoweb.com]DragToWeb.com[/url]

If you would like an account, use the link below to get the free account with an extra 50 MB of storage, just for DA members. I would love to know whether people find this service useful as well as any criticism you may have about the functionality.

[url=http://www.dragtoweb.com/create_account.aspx?t=free&offer=DAMember]http://www.dragtoweb.com/create_account.aspx?t=free&offer=DAMember[/url]

PayPal

Admin — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 13:08:42 GMT

I have enabled PayPal payments again on the [url=/members/subscribe.aspx]subscribe page[/url]. I would like to run this only for current members who are renewing subscriptions for a while to be sure it is working OK.

If there are any brave souls who will be renewing and can do so through paypal, send me a PM and I'll give you an extra month for testing this new feature. Only for the first few or until any bugs are cleared, whichever comes first. :smooooth:

BTW: You may need to refresh that page to see the paypal button.

Happy Birthday DA!

Admin — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 13:19:38 GMT

DA turns two on January 25. To celebrate, I've created a page to mark the event and give everyone a little bonus for being a part of this great community! I will send a note to all members via email, but I'd like to beta test the gift page with those who read this message.

[url=/members/da_birthday.aspx]You can view the birthday page here[/url].

:arrow: Looking forward to another great year!

Voting

glottz — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 10:30:47 GMT

Seems I can't vote .... are there no photos to vote on ?

Site Support

Admin — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 05:13:04 GMT

Official site support will be unavailable December 11, 2007 - January 2, 2008. Email to the site administration will return a note suggesting the member visit the forum. I hope everything goes smoothly while your admin travels on vacation. :Wow:

To all those celebrating the holidays, I hope you have a good one!

Vote Ratio (Great Job!)

Admin — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 13:03:31 GMT

I just noticed the vote ratio is above 2! This is the first time I've seen this. Thank you to all the active voters out there!

I hope everyone has enjoyed the increase in votes you've been receiving. As you know, the ultimate goal is to push this ratio even higher, perhaps stopping somewhere around 4 (this is uncharted territory so we'll see how it works as we go). Nevertheless, I will be bumping the threshold another .1 to 1.9 to lock in the gain we've realized.

Country & Flags

Admin — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 14:57:51 GMT

I've added the ability for you to select your country on [url=/members/update_acct.aspx]your preferences page[/url]. Doing so will show your country on [url=/myprofile.aspx]your profile page[/url] and on select pages, will display a small flag next to your name.

Subscription Rates

Admin — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 14:49:34 GMT

The pricing structure for subscriptions has changed. Some terms have become more expensive and some have become cheaper. New prices are listed on the [url=/members/subscribe.aspx]subscription page[/url].

The prices have changed in an effort to encourage longer term subscriptions and create a more predictable revenue stream in light of removing Google Ads.

Maintenance

Admin — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 10:29:42 GMT

The server is undergoing some routine maintenance. You may experience slower than normal response for the next hour or so.

Thank you

Admin — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 20:50:05 GMT

I'd just like to say thanks to all the active voters and those who have made tough choices on image archival. The site-wide vote ratio has remained high and is above 1.8 as I write this. I hope everyone has noticed an increase in the number of votes you've received. I hope to continue this trend for some time and truly speed up the image life cycle.

Storefronts

Admin — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 07:39:34 GMT

[url=/storefronts.aspx]Storefronts are online[/url]

You can now link to your store using any URL. Visit your [url=/members/update_acct.aspx]account preferences[/url] to set this up.

Sometimes you have a stupid admin

Admin — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 12:38:53 GMT

Since the site moved to v3, a bug has been buried in the upload page that prevented a lot more people from uploading than it should have. So, many people who got the email on the 3,000 image archive were probably not happy to find they could still not upload.

That's the bad news. The good news is that because of the 'worse than it should have been' upload policy, we are really ahead on the vote ratio. The site is presently at almost 1.4:1, which means you should get an average of 1.4 votes per day for each of your images.

The more bad news (for the short term) is that I want to lock these gains into the system, so I've made the threshold now 1.4. This applies now to ALL USERS with an individual ratio of less than 1.4:1 (previously, if you, yourself, had a 1:1 ratio, you could skip this check, now you're bound to having at least the site required ratio).

Again, sorry for the difficulties that came with this change, but it is under control now and everyone should be getting votes much faster than under the old site.

History on Archived Images

Admin — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 11:13:47 GMT

I have changed the archive function to keep the history for 30 days when an image is freshly archived. In the past, history would disappear as soon as an image was archived.

Annual Award Qualification / Archive Change

Admin — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 13:37:22 GMT

The number of raw and signature raw votes required for annual award qualification and archival has changed from 150 to 80. This is in an effort to help bring the votes in balance with the images in the voting pool.

You can see the [url=http://www.dailyawards.com/FAQ.aspx]FAQ[/url] page for a table of all the values.

Happy Thanksgiving

Admin — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 06:03:20 GMT

Today is turkey day in the US so I will not be available. Happy Thanksgiving to those who are celebrating!

Photo Search

Admin — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 18:22:51 GMT

Try out the new photo search page, found under the community / search menu.

Report any issues here.

Bypass Upload Throttle

Admin — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 18:37:14 GMT

In response to the comments regarding the new upload throttle, I have set a rule to allow any user who has cast more votes than received to bypass the site-wide vote throttle. This keeps us from penalizing those who do maintain vote equity.

Sorry for the outage!

Admin — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 05:44:45 GMT

The award selection broke after the move to the new site so the home page was not loading. Everything is back in order now.

DAv3 Goes LIVE!

Admin — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 07:55:16 GMT

As you can see, DAv3 is live today. Please report any issues you encounter either here or in the v3 forum. Thank you to everyone who has helped with the testing!

There are a number of outstanding feature requests and elements (like articles) which remain to be built. Those items will come online over the next few months.

If you encounter visual issues with the site, try using your browser's refresh button as some files share the same name with the old site but contain new content.

Private Messages

Admin — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 18:49:22 GMT

Today I disabled the private message feature and will likely leave it off until [url=http://v3.dailyawards.com]v3[/url] is released. I believe that was causing some issues with the email system at DA.

In v3, the private messages will remain within the system and you will be able to view them (most likely) within the standard forum messaging mechanism.

Sorry for the trouble in the meantime. I promise v3 will be much improved over the current implementation of DA.

Multiple Accounts

Admin — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 07:57:04 GMT

From time to time I like to report activities that go on behind the scenes to help give confidence to the larger community.

It was asked of me today whether I would look into the possibility of duplicate accounts. I did so and found 9 possibilities for account sharing. (equaling a total of 31 accounts) Of those possible duplicates, none had an account weight over 3.

Nevertheless, four of those were obvious duplicates and will be removed.

I hope this illustrates the truth that by in large the community is very honest and even in those few cases where this is not so, the weight system impedes any user from having a significant impact by creating multiple accounts. In other words, multiple accounts simply are not worth the effort and are not a concern to the larger community.

Server Reboot

Admin — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 13:29:00 GMT

The server will be rebooting approximately 5 minutes from the time of this posting. This will cause a momentary outage.

New Accounts

Admin — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 10:09:05 GMT

This should have been announced earlier, but I did not consider how it might appear to some. The site quit deleting old accounts at the time the matrix table was dropped (and we went to the new method for keeping track of the voting pool). As a result, it appears the site is gaining new members much quicker than before, but that is only because the drain plug has been put in the bath tub, so to speak.

Category Announcement

Admin — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 05:18:43 GMT

In a [url=http://www.dailyawards.com/DAForum/FindPost14279.aspx]recent post[/url] I said I would announce a surprise category that will be opening. I am happy to be able to reveal that category so you may all get ready with some photos when it opens.

The new category will be called 'Unexpected' - inspired by [url=http://filemagazine.com/]FILE Magazine[/url]. You may visit the [url=http://filemagazine.com/about.html]About[/url] page at FILE to learn the subject matter that will fit the category.

I am excited that FILE Magazine has agreed to allow us to open this category and I hope you all find the topic fun and challenging!

Sharing some statistics

Admin — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 11:20:29 GMT

Some time ago, I added the feature enabling users to report votes. These reports go into the database where the information is used in conjunction with the collusion mechanism. I recently took a look at all the reports that have been received so far and thought I would share some statistics with you.

40 reports have been received
6 of those are from votes where the weight of the voter was greater than 100
1 of those is from a vote where the weight of the voter was from 10 to 100
33 of those are from votes where the weight of the voter was less than 10

The range of vote reported is between 4 and 6.

I believe this shows again that abuse of the system is extremely rare and again validates the weighted voting mechanism as a defense that works for the photographer.

Friend / Foe Vote Detection

Admin — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 18:10:01 GMT

As I have posted a few times before, there has been some work on a tool that will monitor for collusion between members of this site. The first major piece of this effort has been completed, tested and validated. That piece is friend / foe vote detection.

It is not my intention to reveal the way this tool works or any of the identities that rose to the top, but I can say that the results that were returned were manually validated through communication with the top user. The tool indicated a correlation between the accounts and that correlation proved true.

With that said, I believe I understand now why there is a disconnect between my views of how well the system works and the views of those who say there is a problem. Here is why.

When the script runs without constraints (constraints such as, only look at accounts w/ a significant weight), thousands of hits are returned. However, when I put in reasonable constraints, only five users make the list. Of those five, only two have enough occurances of votes for me to decide to take action.

What I take from this is that I need to do a better job explaining why it does not matter if you get a vote of '4' from a user with a weight of '2'. Votes like this are what comprise the thousands of occurances that I cut off of the result set.

So, here I state for all to know that the combination of the weight mechanism and this new vote collusion detection make the awards VERY fair. I would stand the results of these awards up against any judge or contest system in the world.

I hope those who read this will agree and spread a positive message through the community.

Edited to add:

Reason #2 for the disconnect: Varied voting patterns

This tool considerseach user'svoting 'pattern' to be unique. Just as there are in fact users with an average vote significantly below the site average, there areusers with an average above. So, this tool attempts to take this fact into consideration and does not assume that just because someone voted a 5 on an image that averages 8, the vote is targeted.

As a result, this could mean that a 'low' vote could be a 6, if that user averages a score of 8 (just example numbers), where as another user might have a vote average below 6 and thus a vote of 8 from that user would indicate a 'high' vote.

It is my aim to change the perception on the site and have everyone look globally at the whole system rather than at a single image.

Weighted Votes

Admin — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 06:49:35 GMT

I got a question from a user today:
[quote]I think that somehow you guys have to look at the voting system.I don't mind a low vote at all if that is what the shot is worth, but, the top guys give a fair vote of 7 and 8 and some guys come and vote 5 and even 3.How can this ever be justified?[/quote]
And it prompted me to respond by explaining the weight mechanism:

The core of the system at DA is the weighted voting. This feature virtually eliminates a malicious user from impacting your image rating. I have attached a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet which you can use to see how your image scores are calculated. You can see that a very low score from a low weight member gets virtually wiped out when a high weight member votes on the image.

Here is an excerpt from the sheet. You can see that the first user casts a score of 3, making the image rating 3, but when the next user comes along and casts a vote of 9, the score goes to nearly 9.

Formula [(sum of votes) + (current vote * current weight)] / (total weights so far + current weight)
Vote	Weight	Sum of votes	Total Weights	Current Score
3	5	0	0	3.0000
9	400	15	5	8.9259

[url=http://www.dailyawards.com/Docs/WeightExample.xls]You can download the spreadsheet here, and try out your own scenarios.[/url]

Mechanical Change

Admin — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 06:28:18 GMT

While developing the Challenges portion of the site (it is coming along slowly but surely), I discovered an interesting method to make the vote page more efficient and allow the site to drop the very large vote matrix table that frequently causes performance problems.

I would like to ask anyone reading this thread to [url=http://www.dailyawards.com/vote.aspx]try the new method here[/url].

You should not notice a difference in functionality. I am particularly interested in anyone who is at the buffer within any category. I would like to confirm that this new technique recognizes the buffer limit as well.

Once I am sure this is working, I will convert the real vote page to this setup.

Thanks for your help.

Some Changes

Admin — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 11:50:52 GMT

The last thread in this forum describes a change to the vote system. That change has now gone live.

In addition to this, any image that is archived from this point forward will lose its vote history immediately after archival. All of the statistics will remain available for the image however, the 'last 30 days' of vote detail will be deleted.

This is necessary for the larger change to the vote system.

Protecting Your Awards

Admin — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 11:13:45 GMT

As I have stated here many times before, the top priority for your administrator is the protection of the value of awards granted by this site. An award is meaningless if it can be obtained through untrue means. As many of you already know, there was in the past an issue with two accounts here that exchanged a series of '10' votes for each other. This activity was quickly spotted by the community (thanks to all who keep an eye out) and as a result, I placed a block on those two accounts (to prevent one from voting on the other).

Recently, there have been many members write to me about concerns they have with this system. Often, the concern around these two accounts comes up. As a result, I have decided to go further than the block and also remove all images between these two accounts that contained a vote from the other account. As a result, 362 weight points have been pulled from these two accounts (combined) which equaled 61% of their original total value.

It is my intent to illustrate first to all members that this system is well defended by many elements, some are human driven and some are machine driven (see below). Second, to those who may wonder whether there are ways to beat the system know that ultimately any awards you may gain will be erased.

Here are a few of the items that work to shield this site.

[b]1) User Weight.[/b] By tying voting power to performance and longevity, most voting irregularities are self-correcting.
[b]2) Real-time vote check.[/b] Each vote is compared to the history of votes for that image and very low votes are discarded.
[b]3) Your admin.[/b] When a complaint about a member with significant weight is filed, that complaint is thoroughly investigated and action is taken as needed.
[b]4) You.[/b] Social enforcement works. If you see something questionable, send a [i]private[/i] message to that member.