***DPReview Shutdown Thread -Nikon Z -Pt 2**

mosswings said:

Barleyman said:

Craig268 said:

I would hope that another entity such as a camera gear manufacturer would step up and take over hosting.

If Nikon, Sony, Tamron, etc could take over, it'd still benefit everyone IMO.

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The Crazy thisis that Amazon is one of the largest "Hosting" companies with AWS. This is a nit. Surely they could host, and provide some admin coverage, to allow the Forums to continue, and on the volume alone would generate enough income/sales to cover the cost. Ugh.

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As has been noted, Amazon's "core" business, on-line retail and devices, is losing money big time: $25B in their last annual report. It's AWS that's keeping Amazon in the black. DPR doesn't contribute anything meaningful to AMZ's bottom line.
Hogan noted that just keeping the site up would be extremely difficult - DPR is database driven and databases are notoriously hard to archive. Looking at DPR's staff, at least 3 full-time programmers are needed to maintain the site. Currently the site is estimated to cost AMZ $3+M/year without the sales volume or potential sales growth to justify it.
The only recourse would be to charge for forum membership...which is the kiss of death for the kind of traffic the site enjoys. But it would reveal what the core support for DPR's product is.
Personally, I would NOT want a manufacturer-hosted DPR. There are too many of those and they all tend to be tightly managed for favorable content. AMZ apparently engaged in a bit of that on this site as well.

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Having spent a long career employed by multi billion dollar tech companies (not as big as Amazon though) I have been surprised that DPR lasted as long as it did.

That is not a knock on DPR.

I have wondered if DPR was just lost in Amazon's internal noise and came under more scrutiny as the company tries to improve efficiency, as any company trying to be profitable. I don't fault Amazon for that. They know whether the cost vs revenue is beneficial to them at a meaningful level that they have defined. The consequence of displeasing DPR follows is likely very small compared to their other customers/constituencies.

As someone who followed DPR for about 20 years before I actually created an account (after cutting back work hours) I'm disappointed to see it go. Aside from the work done by paid staff, there was the often difficult time put in by unpaid moderators as well as tons of great information posted in the forums by unpaid contributors. But as much as I would like to I find it hard to fault Amazon for a business decision.

Has has been pointed out the really big loss here is the tremendous amount of historical information in the forums along with some of the other materials available.

As for myself I will likely spend some time looking at the various other forums and arenas (not Facebook), many of which I was aware of. Maybe I will create an account on a couple, or maybe not.

LarsHP said:

I will surely also miss DPR. :-(

It has been my daily go-to photography site. It is here I have posted most of my lens tests etc.

One of the unique things which has been valuable to me (and surely many others) is the camera test studio scene, where we easily can compare resolution, high ISO noise etc. between several cameras. I haven't seen anything like that anywhere else. Just loosing that resource is truly a loss for the photography community.

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I’ve posted here for about 10 years and first time I’ve heard of it. ;p

mosswings said:

Currently the site is estimated to cost AMZ $3+M/year without the sales volume or potential sales growth to justify it.

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IMHO, now if only Sony, Nikon, Canon etc could divert a small portion of their marketing budget, they could easily afford to keep this site running.

Just curious- how much storage space would it take to archive everything here? I know you can request the Wayback machine to take a snapshot of a site, but I'm guessing this is beyond what they'd typically do.

mosswings said:

Hogan noted that just keeping the site up would be extremely difficult - DPR is database driven and databases are notoriously hard to archive. Looking at DPR's staff, at least 3 full-time programmers are needed to maintain the site. Currently the site is estimated to cost AMZ $3+M/year without the sales volume or potential sales growth to justify it.

Click to expand...

As someone working in IT, I don't get this argument that 'Databases are notoriously hard to archive'. Why?? We do this pretty much every day. If you have access to a database (anyone of the modern RDBMS or NoSQL ones like MySQL, Postgres, Oracle or Mongo etc), all of them provide capabilities to create a snapshot and archive for later restoration if required. The restoration could be done to a another instance in the cloud or even to an on-prem server, if anyone is still doing that.

On the other hand, using that restored database and bringing up another site and making it fully functional that's another level of work and definitely not that simple.

I agree that dumping the database in some cases - such as a small/medium mysql db- is trivial, but I shudder to imagine the size of dpreview db. Probably partitioned over scores of HA servers.

raunak said:

mosswings said:

Hogan noted that just keeping the site up would be extremely difficult - DPR is database driven and databases are notoriously hard to archive. Looking at DPR's staff, at least 3 full-time programmers are needed to maintain the site. Currently the site is estimated to cost AMZ $3+M/year without the sales volume or potential sales growth to justify it.

Click to expand...

As someone working in IT, I don't get this argument that 'Databases are notoriously hard to archive'. Why?? We do this pretty much every day. If you have access to a database (anyone of the modern RDBMS or NoSQL ones like MySQL, Postgres, Oracle or Mongo etc), all of them provide capabilities to create a snapshot and archive for later restoration if required. The restoration could be done to a another instance in the cloud or even to an on-prem server, if anyone is still doing that.

On the other hand, using that restored database and bringing up another site and making it fully functional that's another level of work and definitely not that simple.

Click to expand...

I'd say that it's notoriously hard to migrate a database from one tool to another. If all you're doing is icing a particular tool and data file, that's just backing up your data, and as long as everything is compatible when you decide to unthaw, yes, an everyday thing.

I suspect what Hogan was thinking of is for lack of a better term "active archiving", where the site remains accessible but the data becomes static. However, that sort of describes a modern CMS, which operates pretty much hands off.

Jared Polin, on his Youtube channel, said today he might consider buying DPReview.

This is the stuff nightmares are made from.

Karl Huber said:

Jared Polin, on his Youtube channel, said today he might consider buying DPReview.

This is the stuff nightmares are made from.

Click to expand...

I think he was joking (but who knows what to believe).

Wouldn't they just turn off posting?

If Amazon retail is losing money it's because Amazon wants to. They've always tended to put growth over simple profits.

I also think your numbers are off

LarsHP said:

I will surely also miss DPR. :-(

It has been my daily go-to photography site. It is here I have posted most of my lens tests etc.

One of the unique things which has been valuable to me (and surely many others) is the camera test studio scene, where we easily can compare resolution, high ISO noise etc. between several cameras. I haven't seen anything like that anywhere else. Just loosing that resource is truly a loss for the photography community.

Click to expand...

Are you familiar with the 'Compare Images' feature on Imaging Resource?
It has been a great help to me over the years:


André

LauraMacky said:

hrpiii3 said:

mosswings said:

Barleyman said:

Craig268 said:

I would hope that another entity such as a camera gear manufacturer would step up and take over hosting.

If Nikon, Sony, Tamron, etc could take over, it'd still benefit everyone IMO.

Click to expand...

The Crazy thisis that Amazon is one of the largest "Hosting" companies with AWS. This is a nit. Surely they could host, and provide some admin coverage, to allow the Forums to continue, and on the volume alone would generate enough income/sales to cover the cost. Ugh.

Click to expand...

As has been noted, Amazon's "core" business, on-line retail and devices, is losing money big time: $25B in their last annual report. It's AWS that's keeping Amazon in the black. DPR doesn't contribute anything meaningful to AMZ's bottom line.
Hogan noted that just keeping the site up would be extremely difficult - DPR is database driven and databases are notoriously hard to archive. Looking at DPR's staff, at least 3 full-time programmers are needed to maintain the site. Currently the site is estimated to cost AMZ $3+M/year without the sales volume or potential sales growth to justify it.
The only recourse would be to charge for forum membership...which is the kiss of death for the kind of traffic the site enjoys. But it would reveal what the core support for DPR's product is.
Personally, I would NOT want a manufacturer-hosted DPR. There are too many of those and they all tend to be tightly managed for favorable content. AMZ apparently engaged in a bit of that on this site as well.

Click to expand...

is it time to call Elon yet. He seems to have a little extra cash laying around.

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Yes! Amazon could care less about the history here Elon could help save this platform…if anyone has a way to contact him

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Good idea... or not. The only EV brand which would not be against the forum rules to mention would be the T as in T-Ford... but even that only in a positive way...

No, seriously, I hope he is not getting into this business as well. I want nothing to do with that guy or his businesses.

curiousmike1300 said:

There wasn't much "where do we go next" options in the previous thread.

Nikonians (pay) and Reddit (not great for photos) were mentioned, but I also suggested Flickr.

There are multiple Z groups, but i'll throw this one out as the current (seemingly) leader for Z discussion

https://www.flickr.com/groups/3156733@N20/

Click to expand...

While Flickr used to be great, I am not going to give that platform any more clicks than the bare minimum after they went with a paid model and keeping restricting features for free users every couple of years (i prefer business models where the free user is not gimped in basic features with quotas and thresholds, but if they pay they get additional, useful features, like DeviantArt).

"TELL AMAZON WE CAN'T ALLOW THIS ANYMORE. THEY'RE KILLING OUR WEBSITE AS WE SIT BACK AND WATCH. WE MUST SAVE DPREVIEW. BOYCOTT, BOYCOTT, BOYCOTT!!!"

:-x

Damn, this was a surprise. Been a member since 2004. Kinda strange to think that there are now adults who were not even born when I joined. Needless to say, I’ve kinda grown to this site (forums mainly).

Bummer.. need to find a new photo forum.

Karl Huber said:

Jared Polin, on his Youtube channel, said today he might consider buying DPReview.

This is the stuff nightmares are made from.

Click to expand...

I don't expect it to be "for sale."

Robert

Karl Huber said:

Jared Polin, on his Youtube channel, said today he might consider buying DPReview.

This is the stuff nightmares are made from.

Click to expand...

At least he is offering a way to keep the Site running. Unlike the Boneheads running Amazon

MrHollywood said:

Karl Huber said:

Jared Polin, on his Youtube channel, said today he might consider buying DPReview.

This is the stuff nightmares are made from.

Click to expand...

I don't expect it to be "for sale."

Robert

Click to expand...

I agree. For a company the size of Amazon, there's no upside.

Unless someone can make a plea to someone at Amazon to do something to preserve it for some historic significance, digital camera information lost forever type of thing, it's gone.

And frankly, in amongst a pound of worthwhile info, there's four tons of bs.

Here is an article which can shed some light on what is going on