chicago-photography-notices

[chicago-photography-notices]

What happened to the photowalks?

A few years ago, I had publicly expressed hopes of getting a photowalk going. This didn’t seem too far-fetched, because I had a group of a few thousand members who had been turning a lot of beautiful work, and because I had a specific purpose in mind. There was something we were going to do that wasn’t (as far as I knew) being done, yet - we were going to have nighttime photo walks in Chicago, enjoying safety in numbers.

This was not to be. As I soon learned, only one troll (let’s call him “Scenemaster” - not his real name or pseudonym) was needed to kill the entire plan. I had concerns about a particular member who seemed to be arguing that an overreaction on the part of one woman to being photographed in public was a legitimate reason for her to spray mace in his eyes. As we would have to reply on each other during a photowalk, for one of the members to be an apologist for unprovoked violence would be cause for worry.

Later on, I discovered that he was telling us something less than the whole truth. He was fond of running up to people, shoving his camera in their faces and snapping photos in this aggressive, intrusive manner. The visible fear we see in the woman’s face in the photo “Scenemaster” chose to show us becomes more than understandable, as does her use of mace, when we find out that he was charging her. I guess he must have had a high speed camera that took out the blur. All we saw was her beautiful, terrified face shot from about 50 feet away. Scenemaster was making her look like a lunatic while pretending to care oh so sensitively about her feelings. But he didn’t do such a good job of keeping us from seeing his very real insanity.

After I asked him about his views regarding the use of violence, he responded with a barely coherent rant about his love of gouging out the eyes of those who angered him and of wiping their viteous humors on their shirts. He sounded like a psychopath. I was not too surprised when I visited his page on Yelp and found him talking about the time he had spent in jail. This, I decided (without having to think much about this), was somebody we didn’t need to have on a photowalk. He wouldn’t be a safe person to be around. Even if he didn’t physically attack any of us (and that would not have been a safe bet to make), would we want to be with him as he attacked somebody else, becoming accessories to his crimes in the process and wondering if the people he hurt would have been hurt, had we had chosen a better companion?

No, that would have been a good idea. I banned him from my groups, and then watched the drama begin as people rallied around the poor, oppressed psychopath who had been asked to go away. Nobody rallied around me, as an unsuccessful attempt was made to get me thrown off of Flickr, for not inviting somebody with a hair trigger temper and a criminal record on a night time photowalk. This was insane and the insanity never went away. In time, I just started shutting down the discussion sections for my groups on Flickr and gave up on the idea of organizing any photowalks through that site, ever again.

At this point, I would refuse to set one up through any website. This doesn’t mean that I absolutely will never try to get a photowalk going but, if I do, I will be setting it up offline, and not say anything about it online until after the fact, going on these only with people I know personally, who’ve earned my trust. People who I know will not give out directions when asked for them online, just to be “nice.” Forget being “nice”, let’s start using our common sense.

The Internet is a great place to meet dangerously crazy people. They can come in from out of the shadows, do their damage and then vanish, never to be seen again. This is why I keep so many details of my personal life vague and suggest that other people do likewise. Who needs this?

main page / my blog

[chicago-photography-notices]

Repurposing in Progress

I swear I’m not making this up.

A while ago, I noticed that the domain name registration for the World of Webring site was about to expire. A little alarmed by this, I wrote the man who was running that company to alert him to the existence of the problem. He sent me back a note assuring me that nothing was about to expire, that this was just a trick on the part of Network Solutions to get him to switch to them for domain registration, instead of using a competitor.

A few months passed, and his domain name expired. It was snapped up by somebody who created a site explaining webrings in very general terms. The other Ringlink service he was running broke down. He refused to attempt to regain the old world of webring url or to fix the broken ringlink on his own site, deciding that he’d create a brand new ringlink system also on his own site, to which he’d move the world of webring data.

At that point, I gave up on the idea of running a photography ring. How many times have I had to relocate and start over, because somebody running a service decided to flake out? I could start over again, but why? Why bother? Who is going to join knowing that he might be asked to yank out all of the code from his site and replace it with new code, because the spoiled brat son of the owner of the company decided to lock me out of my account because I dared to say something was unreasonable, or because the spammer who bought out the ring provider decided to redirect all of the links on our navbars toward the hubpages on which he had his advertising? These aren’t hypotheticals, these are things that really happened.

The spoiled 22 year old son of the owner - let me tell you about that. A friend of mine was running an ancient Greek and Roman history ring on a service we will leave unnamed. One day, he sees a site in the queue that is already on 500 different rings. It is a zero effort, one paragraph site in which the site owner announced that he was starting a new religion, and that the sole tenet of the religion was that there was nothing wrong with being gay. While my friend agreed with this statement (as would I), he wondered what this had to do with ancient history. Also, the site had minimal content, and had been mass submitted. This was an abuse of the submission process. My friend told the site owner that his application had been declined and that he would not be welcome on any other ring that the friend ran, because he didn’t want to see his rings  being spammed.

What he didn’t know at the time was that the spammer worked for the hosting service. He soon started getting messages from the company, which threatened to put his rings up for adoption if he didn’t maintain them better. Logging in to see what needed to be done, he found that there was nothing to do. There were no pending sites, no sites with broken code, no broken image links - he couldn’t fix anything, because there was nothing to fix. He wrote back, expressing his amazement at what had just happened and asking if reality mattered. He then got back a note threatening him with the termination of his membership for being so “rude” and “abusive” as to point out that what the company just did made no sense.

The friend was using an ISP that a number of us used, because it was the only ISP in the city of over 100,000 people we all used to live in. That ISP used dynamic IP, all IP addresses coming from a common block, so when the misbheaving company administrator decided to harass the ringmaster who said “no“ to him and checked for IP addresses, he ended harassing everybody who had ever lived in one of the largest cities in Illinois, and who had an account at that company. I had a number of my accounts locked by this fellow. They remain locked to this day.

Ain’t laissez-faire grand? Such is the level of professionalism in the ring hosting business. At some point, I think one has to give oneself permission to say “I give up.” The concept of a webring has more than a little merit, which is why I keep putting my sites on them, but running a webring (unless maybe it is a personal ring) is a headache I don’t want. What craziness is going to happen, next? It’s not even fun craziness. It’s just aggravation.

I’ll find another use for this blog and maybe another way for people to network. Maybe. The social media sites tend to be troll-infested places where users go to dump content and interact with nobody who they are not abusing, so the question is what sort of networking would take place. My thought is - maybe something in the real world. Forget about online networking, because it is a failure that has kept on failing for years. Make people get off their lazy butts, be brave and drop by to say hello in person if they want tp participate. Everybody seems to be assuming that the future of the social Net is Instagram, but maybe it’s Meetup.

But that’s way off into the future. In the meantime, you’re going to be seeing some of my own terrible photography, some of it being of people at Photography Shows as I talk about events I’ve gone to and am encouraging people to attend. Yes - I’m going to encourage people to turn off their computers and go outside. Shocking, but these things happen and they should have been happening a lot more often and a lot sooner.

The Internet should never have become a substitute for real life, it should have been a tool for facilitating it, for helping people to connect and find each other in the real world. When we forget that, we empower those who hide behind computer screens with good reason, and those are not the sort of people we should ever want to see get the upper hand in any social setting.

[chicago-photography-notices]

Where things stand

If this page is loading slowly, suggesting that Tumblr might be experiencing an unusually heavy server load at the moment, you can try starting with this page on the homepage for the ring.

Yes, you're on a blog, and yes, I'm using the blog as a homepage for my ring, in tandem with a regular html site. Of late, much to the annoyance of ring members and ring managers alike, homepage hosting services have been getting a little flaky, vanishing right and left, and breaking rings in the process. Free blogging hosts, on the other hand, especially big ones like Tumblr, have been a lot more stable, and when you think about it, what is a blog other than a website on some of whose files a linear, chronological ordering has been imposed? I can stick anchor tags into the posts, I can link between the posts and the static pages (which Tumblr offers), using my blog as if it were a homepage, one a lot less likely to ever break the ring. This saves the visitor time, because he's not running into another roadblock as he surfs the ring. It saves the ring manager time, because he isn't hearing from a member who has to keep reapplying to the ring. As for the member, himself - who doesn't like to be able to do a job, and just have it be done? So this seems to be win-win-win-win, because Webring certainly doesn't benefit when people give up and wander away from Webring, out of frustration.

If you're thinking of joining the World of Webring version of the Amateur Photography in Chicago ring, I think you'll find that there are definite benefits to doing so. For some reason, Google likes this ring and the sites on it, and there seems to be some real link love to be given. Chicago Photography, which somebody I know calls "the home office" for the ring, is a lot larger than it used to be. With 2005 members, it is now seems to be one of the four largest Chicago area groups on Flickr, judging from a not at all brief survey of the groups I could find. As small as this ring might still look, it does put you in a position to get in touch with a lot of local people who share your interest, and I'm very happy to welcome new members into the ring.

While you'll still find links to the ring at Ringsurf, I would, at least for the moment, strongly advise against joining that version of the ring. Basic functionality has broken down at ringsurf to such an extent that one can no longer update one's ring memberships. I've written to the company - twice, now, and am trying to be patient with them, and give them a chance, but they don't seem to want to bother. I'll probably either delete the other ring, or replace it with a new ring on a competing service, some time this summer, if not sooner. As Summer is officially only four days away at this point, and my first request for help with this problem went in a few days after the official start of Spring, I think you can guess just how little patience I have left, at this point. With Ringsurf.

The World of Webring is still pretty cool, though. James Huggins, the sysop at WOW, has an excellent reputation going back for more than a few years, and I don't think he's going to let us down. If you'd like to join the ring, just go to the opening post for this blog, and all will be explained.

Or, if you prefer, you can head straight to the ring, where you'll find a few pages to look at. When you decide that you'd like to return to one of the rings to which this ring belongs, just click on the link on the navbar marked with the name of the ring ("Amateur Photography in Chicago") and you'll head straight home.

[chicago-photography-notices]

Moving On

The Webring.cc system has closed. I'm relocating the ring to the WOW Webring system, which Network Solutions lists as being under the management of the very highly regarded James S. Huggins, one of those people who I've sort of semi-known from the Internet since the old days. I'm always please to give Mr. Huggins a little extra business, and other seem to feel likewise, judging from the growth of his system.

Relatively little needs to be done in the course of this relocation. Ringlink code is swappable between systems, and the join page is hosted on one of my own sites. I'll slowly phase out the old ... older? ... version of the ring one site at a time, closing the Webring.cc version to new applications, today.

Originally posted elsewhere on December 9, 2008

[chicago-photography-notices]

What?

These blog posts (note: the posts have since been moved to my personal archive) tell most of the story. As of the time of this writing, the original ring at a ring hosting service which need not be named is still under the control of "Chicago", but the password and e-mail on that account have been changed, with the result that I am no longer "Chicago". Somebody in Support has been, ever since one of their representatives threw a hissy fit over the fact that I dared to be mildly critical of their job performance in public.

Such a response is unprofessional and unacceptable. The original "Amateur Photography in Chicago" ring has mainly been relocated to "Lord of the Rings", with some small presence remaining at the original provider. At some point in the not very distant future, probably in a month or two, if more reasonable behavior has not been seen out of them than has been seen out of them in the last few years, I'll simply delete their code from this page and they will have another abandoned ring to add to their large and growing collection. Restoring my unhampered access to my own account would be a nice start to winning back a little of the trust that the company has squandered with its adolescent attitudes and juvenile behavior in its dealings with me, but if they wish to continue acting like jerks, that's fine, too.

Addendum: April 23: The company's response was to place my ring up for adoption, and my response was to delete some more code. At this point, they have a dead ring on their hands, and I have a solidly good reason to feel glad that I began the switch over to Ringlink. I did try working with these people - note the numerous and really excessive links back to home you'll now find throughout my sites, present as per their request - and their corporate response was this. On terms like these, I'm more than glad to say goodbye to the old ring, as I really don't need this kind of drama and to be blunt, this kind of betrayal. "Do what we ask you to and we'll ... stick it to you in exactly the same way we would have, had you told us to go take a flying leap and refused to do any of it". Something to think about if you ever think of doing business with these people, or go very far out of your way in trying to cooperate with them.

Originally posted elsewhere, April 17, 2007. Reposted here with slight revision.

[chicago-photography-notices]

A Companion Ring

I created a companion ring for this one, over at Ringsurf. You can see the navbar for the new ring at the bottom of this page. This one you can get onto without the personal interview. I've left it open, as per the more relaxed policies at Ringsurf, but it is the applicant's responsibility to send me a notice that he has applied to this other ring. Same deal - I'm not going to check in daily for something that might happen once per year. While these two rings share a common homepage, they will not be clones of each other. One can apply to one or another, but not both.

A little something to brighten the day of those not adventurous enough to meet a stranger at Starbucks.

Originally posted elsewhere on September 1, 2005

[chicago-photography-notices]

The Amateur Photography in Chicago Ring

Not much to report yet, as I've just created this ring. Yes, it's closed, technically, but that doesn't mean that you can't join it. Applications to this ring are likely to be few and far between, so simply leaving the ring open poses a problem. Do I drive myself crazy by logging in frequently and finding nothing, or do I seldom log in, and drive the applicant crazy? Neither sounded like a great idea. The solution I chose was to set up a very simple application procedure, one for which, given the fact that this is a local ring, there is no sensible reason for objection. If you want to join this ring, sign up for my homelist or for the non-adult Chicago Photography list at Yahoogroups, whichever you prefer, and ask to make an appointment to see me. I'll get back in touch with you, and you bring your portfolio, scrapbook or whatever else you feel like carrying your photos in. This is not a "come on, come all" ring. While I'm not insisting that you be a professional artist - I, myself, wouldn't qualify on those terms - I do expect to see an effort at growth as an amateur. So if you're going to drop by with a few instamatics of your dog catching a frisbee, please don't. Also, this is not an adult ring. "Childsafe" may be a little stringent, but let's say "teenager safe"; let's keep this one down to a PG rating. As for the rest of your site, political incorrectness is OK, Hate is not. If you're calling for harm to be done to another human being because of race, color, creed, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, status as a liberal or conservative, or anything else that does not involve your target willfully doing harm or injustice to another, please take it elsewhere. I reserve the right to reject any application for any reason, or for no reason at all. I'm not likely to exercise the second option, as I do want to see this ring grow, but let there be no misunderstanding on this - my final decision is a judgment call, and I make it unilaterally and without apology. This list is solely for the use of those living in the Chicago area, who wish to share images taken in the Chicago area. This ring is intended to be a community building exercise. I'm not going to haggle over what "in the Chicago area" means when I say that the pages submitted to this ring must be of places in the Chicago metropolitan area. Rockford does not qualify. Milwaukee and St.Louis are straight out. The Chicago area consists of Cook, DuPage, Will, Kane, McHenry and Lake counties in Illinois and Lake County in Indiana, and including McHenry county is pushing it. No other counties are included. Your site must essentially be a noncommercial one. I won't get bent out of shape if you set up a bookstore with Amazon.com, but if you submit a car dealership webpage, or something else that is primarily intended to move merchandise, I won't be amused. Not that this will keep some people for trying, which is one of the reasons for requiring those interviews - they screen out a lot of nuisance applications. Did that answer all questions? If not, you can easily find my homelist and ask me. As long as you're willing to be civil and reasonable, I think you'll find that I'm very easy to deal with. But guys, I'm not going to take any nonsense out of you. We've been seeing "bad behavior for fun and profit" become the norm online over the last few decades, and change in that area is long overdue. For myself, I'm going to insist on seeing a little of that change happen here, on this new ring: behave or be gone. Fair enough?

Originally posted elsewhere on July 31, 2005. Slightly updated, March 13, 2007.