• Members 2 posts
    April 2, 2023, 6:34 p.m.

    Can all the forum posts, at a minimum, be rehosted here?

    Reviews and news?

  • Members 28 posts
    April 2, 2023, 6:49 p.m.

    Just out of curiosity, why would that be desirable? I for one wouldn’t want my DPR posts to be arbitrarily added to this site.

  • Members 146 posts
    April 2, 2023, 6:51 p.m.

    It seems that's unlikely, as it would probably require a copyright release from Amazon (and the prospect of that happening is low).

    I'm sure it's been under consideration, but I don't think we should get our hopes up, unfortunately.

  • Members 146 posts
    April 2, 2023, 6:58 p.m.

    A lot of valuable information was shared on the old site. Sometimes by people who aren't with us any more, or who aren't likely to participate here and/or answer the same questions all over again.

    Even where the people and/or information is still at hand, searching past threads to find an answer to a query (and therefore not having post post the question) can improve the "signal-to-noise" ratio such that most threads are about new or unique issues rather than rehashing things that have been addressed and resolved.

    In that respect, losing access to the historical content of DPR puts us all back to square one. I suspect LongTimeNikonUser is looking for a way to minimize the damage...

  • Members 510 posts
    April 2, 2023, 6:59 p.m.

    There are roughly 76 forums at dpreview, some with close to a quarter of a million threads.
    Math makes my head hurt, so… I’m not going to calculate how many posts that there have been since 1998

  • Members 28 posts
    April 2, 2023, 7:06 p.m.

    As I understand it, one can request all of their old content from Amazon/DPR and repost it at will. I have requested all my gallery images, but none of my postings or comments. I just have an issue with others, unknown to me, harvesting my content for whatever reason.

  • Members 146 posts
    April 2, 2023, 7:13 p.m.

    I get where you're coming from. I suspect that the user agreement at DPR gave them the legal right to use or pass on our post content, so I'm not sure there would be a legal basis to prevent it if Amazon were to decide to make content available.

    However, I suspect the point will prove moot, because I don't think Amazon is likely to be interested or cooperative. And even if they were, as @Greg says, the amount of content involved would almost certainly be prohibitive (I doubt the current servers at dprevived have the storage capacity for that - especially when you consider all the embedded high res images folk posted on DPR over the years...).

  • Members 28 posts
    April 2, 2023, 7:21 p.m.

    You are most likely correct that I would have no way to prevent such transfers of my content, and to be honest, my old content is of little value to me, much less anyone else, I suspect. And beyond that storing all that data in the off chance that someone might want to get some insight on my use of my old Canon D30 (or was it 30D) seems questionable.

  • Members 510 posts
    April 2, 2023, 7:44 p.m.

    Maybe one day AI will index/read all of the old postings. lol
    I sure as heck ain't no conspiracy theorist, just an ordinary guy, but… in the immortal words of Sergeant Phil Esterhaus, let’s be careful out there.


    VALL-E can take a three-second recording of someone’s voice, and replicate that voice, turning written words into speech, with realistic intonation and emotion depending on the context of the text.
    The audio prompts are sampled from the Emotional Voices Database.

    Watch-out grandma…
    ’I’m in trouble and I need you to send me 100 bucks straight away’, ‘I will explain later’.


    Edit: In year three (December 2001) there was already one million posts at dpreview.
    www.dpreview.com/articles/1351310883/dpreviewlateststats

  • Members 535 posts
    April 3, 2023, 6:28 a.m.

    At the top of this page there are counts for total threads and total posts. Some 47.5 million posts currently. But an important stat is missing, the number of members, or perhaps, number of active members. I really wonder what the number is.

  • Members 510 posts
    April 3, 2023, 6:39 a.m.

    Very good, and that’s funny as I have been on that page many times and never noticed the stats.

    One fellow here mentioned that he had just signed out of dpreview for the very first time in decades!
    but, I received an email quite some time back… that I had to confirm my existence.

    Basically a head-count of active members, so they know. lol

  • Members 17 posts
    April 3, 2023, 10:31 a.m.

    Yes, the number of DPR Forums active member would be interesting to know. Of course we would need a definition of "active member": a person who posted at least once during the last week? or once during the last month? or maybe three times during the last year? Sure those who passed away, or lost interest in photography, or got a reason for permanently hate the site cannot be counted as "active"!
    My feeling is that at present the number of active members there is 4,000 to 6,000. Just my feeling.
    That would mean about one half migrated here already. Credible?

    About copying the whole DPR Forums content: Not worth the effort, IMHO.

  • Members 137 posts
    April 3, 2023, 5:48 p.m.

    I remember Richard Butler (I think) stating a few years back that the forums on DPReview only amounted to a few percent of the sites' traffic. Something like 1 or 2% IIRC. He expressed (again IIRC) that the forums were not that important to the mother company. Just something I remembered for I thought it unexpected at the time. Still do.

  • Members 146 posts
    April 3, 2023, 6:24 p.m.

    If the "mother company" in this case refers to Amazon, I think it's pretty evident that the whole operation, forums included, were not viewed as important.

    Even if we're not talking about Amazon as such, it doesn't seem as though anyone has been vociferously advocating for the forums to continue. Or if they have, they've successfully kept their advocacy under wraps.

    But the value (or lack of value) placed on the forums is presumably an extension of the perceived mission or purpose. E.g. if the primary motive was to drive camera sales, the forums were probably fairly incidental to the movement of that particular needle. Not saying they'd have had no effect, but that it would likely have been mostly indirect - and hard to quantify.

  • Members 137 posts
    April 3, 2023, 7:21 p.m.

    My bad. The 'mother company' in this case was DPreview, not Amazon. So what I recall is a post by Richard Butler stating that only 1 or 2% of the total DPReview traffic was generated by the forums. Then again, it was a long time ago and I'm 'getting older'.

  • Members 6 posts
    April 3, 2023, 8:10 p.m.

    Maybe Butler was not all that aware of how important the forums were for photographers. I made many purchases inspired by comments of other users.
    My response to Amazon's vandalism is to never buy anything photography related from them ever again, even if it costs me a bit more.
    I hope others feel equally annoyed and insulted by their short sightedness.