The "Other" Photo Website (Photo.Net)

[dynachrome]

Has it disappeared?
{Moderator's note - it is back! - and the thread title has been edited to dispel the initial mystery}

 

[chriscrawfordphoto]

What website are you asking about? If you mean APUG, you're already there. APUG was renamed Photrio and expanded to allow forums dedicated to digital and hybrid processes.

 

[DWThomas]

If you are talking about the site whose name begins with Photo, their certificate appears to have expired on November 4th and so far the problem continues. The latest version of Firefox doesn't appear to allow a bypass, Micro$oft Edge allowed me to get there (but why bother, since few are there.).

 

[MattKing]

In case you are working under the misapprehension that Photrio prohibits mentioning "competing" websites, you can be reassured that it generally isn't a problem if you refer to them. We do discourage discussions and threads about them.
Of course, you may be just superstitious - perhaps this "Other" site is an internet version of "The Scottish Play"

 

[snusmumriken]

In case of confusion, FADU is still there. Not the same high activity as Photrio, but no pointless squabbling either.

 

[koraks]

Has it disappeared?

I assume we're talking about Photo.net? Yeah, it's odd - seems to be down. Domain tools shows the domain is registered but without a website attached to it.
Is Philip Greenspun still involved in this or has he sold it off eons ago?

 

[halfaman]

I can't access the web either via http or https. So there should be something else going on else besides certificate.

 

[Mr Flibble]

Something about Daylight Saving Time change-over causing the server/computer times to not mesh properly?

 

[koraks]

Something about Daylight Saving Time change-over causing the server/computer times to not mesh properly?

Does not seem likely. They're using an Amazon hosting service. I'd expect them to (1) prevent something as basic as that going wrong and (2) to fix it within a few hours tops if it happened.

More likely causes IMO are:
(1) administrative error; e.g. failure to renew hosting contract in a timely fashion, resulting in discontinuation of service.
(2) technical and/or security issue affecting the hosted content (e.g. CMS security breach), resulting in the hosting provider taking the account offline to limit exposure/damage to other clients.

 

[BMbikerider]

In case of confusion, FADU is still there. Not the same high activity as Photrio, but no pointless squabbling either.

And why refer to it as a website. The correct term is a 'forum' which is a totally different concept.

 

[Nitroplait]

Unfortunately the current ownership of photo.net does not seem to put much, if any, resources into maintenance.

They got the site as part of a larger transaction and don’t seem to think it has potential.

I am crossing fingers for them to show pity and at least re-establish operability.

Photo.net still has some relevance IMO. It is a great resource archive for film photography knowledge covering the time where all photographers shot film - not just predominantly hobbyists and artists.

Although relatively quiet today there are still new worthwhile threads popping up, and a very sympathetic active photo sharing community, especially in the “No Words” category.

 

[Don_ih]

seems to be down

It's not down. When you bypass the security certificate requirement, the site is up and active. It even has a thread about the expired certificate.

 

[koraks]

It's not down.

This is what I get. That's not an SSL problem. It's an actual connection problem.
It is possible that this connection issue only exists from certain parts of the world.

A tracert suggests my request makes it OK somewhere into Amazon's networks and then breaks down:

Hops 17-19 are Amazon. After that, something seems to be MIA.

 

[Don_ih]

Well, there are people posting in it right now. Latest post was a minute ago complaining about Chrome saying "your information will be stolen".

Maybe the invalid certificate blocks the site somewhere between its host and your service provider?

 

[koraks]

Something like that is certainly conceivable, although most of the time, I'd just see the same SSL warning you and others have been getting. So it would be remarkable proactive on the side of whatever system is supposed to pass those data. It's well beyond the scope of the kind of routers you see in the tracert.

 

[Tom Kershaw]

As of 12:50 GMT I'm unable to access photo.net

 

[Flighter]

Looks like an invalid certificate problem.

Using Safari on an iPad I get the message "Safari can't open the page because it couldn't establish a secure connection to the server."

However, using Firefox on the iPad, and after clicking through a warning of impending Armageddon I can access it. Last post was an hour ago saying they can't access from Safari but can access from their iPod but can't download images.

 

[BrianShaw]

I hope we’re not missing out on anything important!

 

[Flighter]

…like what Harman are up to!

 

[analogwisdom]

I hope that it comes back up. If it doesn't, I hope the majority of threads are archived. There was a lot of niche information about certain film-related things on those forums.

 

[Andrew O'Neill]

Works for me...once you bypass the security warning.

 

[koraks]

Yeah, after a forced reload, I now get a regular SSL warning, too.
Looks like a simple case of an expired certificate. I trust someone out there will fix it once they realize they're missing out on significant ad revenues.

 

[blee1996]

The main asset of photo.net is its wealth of knowledge from decades of earlier threads. I was in college when Philip Greenspan started the website and I even used its software to build our own college student community forum. When I do google search on obscure vintage camera or lens, often there are previous discussions on photo.net.

I also visit it regularly, especially the Classic Manual Camera sub-forum. It is still reasonably active with a good friendly albeit small community.

As several noted, it is a simple SSL certificate expiration issue. If it were my own site, I could have gotten it sorted out in 15 minutes. The main obstacle might be that today's admin might not be the one who did the certificate years ago, so there might be some ownership/access privilege issue.

 

[Dustin McAmera]

When they moved to new forum software (about a year ago?) the on-site forum search was restricted to the last ten years. You can still search all the way back from Google etc, but you lose things like restricting your search by date, user or certain fora, and the 'display as threads' function. So that archive of old discussions isn't as useful as it used to be.

 

[Steven Lee]

@Sean Have you tried reaching out to them to see if they'd be interested folding photo.net data into Photrio? They are clearly just letting it die, as evidenced by slow deterioration of activity and technology (old threads have HTML tags in them).