Saving POE

This message also shows in the main donation thread

When a numerical list is compiled I would suggest that the majority people would want to be at or near the top, it's human nature after all.

The membership list now starts with the Gold Star Premier members. When it first changed to this system a few days ago I was in the top 10, I am now at 79.

I would be a lot happier if I was way down somewhere between 1000 - 2000 or even lower. So come on all POEster's who are still deciding or waiting for payday. Make your donations and keep me being relegated. The lower I go the better the chances of success for this wonderful site. So please do what ever you can to help me get near the bottom of the list

Linda-Mary says>>>Chris & Sarah should have the final word if any photos should be archived.  Myself, I like photos of a town or city's buildings and people.  There is enough landscape.  Tourists want both, speaking as a tourist.  The real point of the site is to get tourists to Britain, isn't it?

I reckon you hit the nail on the head there Linda-Mary. Thanks for your continued support and donation dear friend.

In my original post I used the term 'Landscape' loosely and certainly buildings and people should be shown. I took this picture and it is listed under 'festivals and events' http://www.picturesofengland.com/Upton_upon_Severn/pictures/1120343 It may encourage  people to visit Upton on Severn.

If the site costs can be helped by deleting years old poor quality images I can see no harm in this. Quality and relevance rather than quantity.

Regards, Patrick.

Link made 'clickable' Patrick

That particular picture wouldn't make me want to visit Upton-upon-Severn Patrick, but when you realise it was taken at a 'Blues Festival' well, it kind of puts a different light on it.

I suppose what I am saying is that there can be no accounting for taste, whatever suits you, won't necessarily suit another.

So where do you start, what do you think members?

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for you concern but please don't start deleting pictures just yet. Any image deletion will come via the image cap system being introduced to non-premier members, and will incorporate careful selection/testing to avoid any harmful effects to the site this may cause.

Our problem is that the pictures (including their titles/descriptions) are what bring in the majority of the sites visitors. Without the high amount of visitors we get, we would have little chance of attracting any advertisers/sponsors for the site and the little revenue we do get from people clicking the google ads and booking hotels would cease altogether, it would have a huge detrimental effect on the site if we were to lets say delete 50% of the images.

As a quick example I typed in to google 'upton upon severn blues festival pictures' and if you do the same you'll see in the top results is a link on google to your Pictures of England photos with reference to the festival - Here is a link to those results. - That's how we get our traffic.

Again thanks for your concern, but the solution is not as straightforward as it may first seem.

All the best, Chris and Sar

I think so many members have found POE because they google searched for something or somewhere in particular in England. 

In my case I was looking for pictures which would hopefully inspire paintings and I typed in something like "streams in England"! and found POE and so many gorgeous pictures to look at.  Been here ever since too, lol.

I have noticed that when pictures are removed it leaves just a bar with the title of the pic and the photographer but no picture, this shows up in quite a few of the forum threads which use pictures or showcases someone's photos.  It does the same in "My favourites" too.  So removing pictures leaves gaps in the system.

On a slightly different note - the more description given to each photograph the more Google hits are likely - so when adding your photos perhaps a good description of what is depicted in the photo could draw more visitors?   

BTW Patrick I hope it wasn't the gorgeous picture of Smithy with all the Autumn shaded leaves that you removed.  You'll be messing up my members tour of Beloved dogs! lol.

I am happy to say that if it was that one you removed it is still thankfully in the tour. Perhaps Chris or Sarah could tell me if the removal of pics would affect the member's tours.

Hi Cathy,

These gaps shouldn't be happening but we are aware of it. It's one of the jobs we will get round to eventually.

It is an enormous task to keep the site constantly maintained. From sorting bug fixes out to implementing new security patches for various sections of code, fixes for new versions of browsers etc everytime they come out, and so on and so on.

Aside from that there is approx 50,000 lines of programming code on the site, around 860 fields in the database, spread across 85 different tables with a total sum of 1.1 million records of data, and these figures are growing on a daily basis, all adding to the time and costs of running the site.

Deleting pictures shouldn't affect the tours though, just the forum and favourites page, as you have already pointed out.

Forgot to add, that before we implement the image cap we will try and address these issues, and thanks for pointing them out to us..