Renew Your Storage Space Subscription Today and Save
Staring May 22, 2004, ShutterPoint will adjust storage space subscription prices for subscription renewals
as well as new accounts. Please refer to the table below for price comparisons:
| Expiration Renewal/New Account |
Current Price |
New Price |
| 50 MB for 6 months |
$7 |
$9 |
| 50 MB for 1 year |
$13 |
$15 |
| 100 MB for 6 months |
$13 |
$15 |
| 100 MB for 1 year |
$25 |
$25 (no change) |
When adding more storage to an existing account, we use different pricing: flat daily rate of 0.07 cents for
each additional MB of storage space. Staring May 22, 2004, this rate will drop to 0.065 cents for 1 MB of
storage space. This rate equals to $23.73 per year for 100 MB of space.
If you do not need any additional storage space, you may benefit by
renewing your subscription before the new
prices will go into effect.
Ratings Reform
Several months ago ShutterPoint implemented the first major rating system reform. We addressed the problem of a
high number of photos that were left unrated with the introduction of the rewards program, and
the anti-revenge rule was created to help
combat abuse and offense. We changed the way the ratings were calculated and
dropped the simple average in favor of the more accurate and fair
numeric rating normalization.
There was, however, one problem with the rating system that was left unaddressed - the excessive volume of
10's given to lots of photos as if that was the only selection available.
Take a look at some of statistics below that are based on photos submitted within the last 3 months:
| Average Total Rating: | 9.521 |
| Average Total Rating of the photo that received 5 ore more ratings: | 9.805 |
| Average Total Rating of the photo that received less than 5 ratings: | 9.443 |
| Individual Rating Given | Number of Times Given |
| 10 | 37723 |
| 9 | 5140 |
| 8 | 1205 |
| 7 | 397 |
| 6 | 96 |
| 5 | 44 |
| 4 | 19 |
| 3 | 10 |
| 2 | 11 |
| 1 | 10 |
As you can see, 10 is by far the most popular rating, and the higher the number of raters, the more likely the
total rating will get higher. An explanation to this is very simple: photographers like to rate only the
best photos and giving others 10 creates a high chance of getting a 10 in return. On the surface,
everyone seems to be happy and ratings are perfect, and things are excellent. Not quite so. However, if we
revisit the purpose of the rating system, flaws become obvious. The purpose of the rating system is to:
a) provide photographers with constructive feedback to help them improve;
b) provide photo buyers an initial gauge to help them sort out great from average.
When most of the photos are straight 10's, neither of the goals above is reached. When a 10 is given, a photographer
learns nothing to help him/her improve, and a lot of photographers, in fact, genuinely want to learn something new.
We are aware of some of reasons for not rating photos with anything but 10:
a) I don't want an aggravation and I don't want a revenge rating;
b) If I like a photo, I rate it, otherwise I find it boring and I do not look at it;
c) When I rate a photo 10, in return I can get the 10 given to my photos.
Any of the reasons above may sound reasonable to some, but this does nothing to help reach the goals of having
ratings in the first place. Taking the facts presented here into consideration, we will be soon introducing the
new reform to the rating system.
As the particular details are being worked out, the goal of the new change is to make giving steady series of
10's less attractive for a rater. The first change you will see is points assigned for rating photos will be
dependant on the numeric rating given - the closer to the middle of the scale the rating falls, the more
points will be assigned.
The changes will go into the testing phase in the first half of May, and may already start becoming part of
the rating system in June. We intend to make the transition more gradual by adding certain features or measures over a period of time, if necessary.
Album Descriptions
Unless you already noticed, you now can add descriptions to your entire albums, in addition to individual photos.
Album descriptions will allow you to describe a set of photos in one place, which will help you to better organize
your photos.
Go to My Albums to get started. Descriptions are
shown when someone looks at your entire album, or looks for an album by its name.
Webmaster's Tools
Many members who have their own websites are asking us how they can link to their photos at ShutterPoint. If you
are a site owner and interested in linking to ShutterPoint from your website, please refer to
Webmaster's Tools. A while back we put together a page
to help webmasters and site owners create links and other HTML elements to put on their websites. Choose from simple
text links or flashy images leading to either YOUR photos or ShutterPoint homepage. You can even add a
search form to your webpage that will allow your visitors to search only through YOUR photos you have at
ShutterPoint.
Explore your options and steer more people to your photos!
Various Enhancements
From reorganizing search pages to sortable columns on
Statistics page to
improving FAQs, we have made many small-scale changes to
make your experience with ShutterPoint easier and more pleasant. Additionally, you can now access
past newsletters in the Guides section, which can be
interesting if you want to learn how to utilize the website to its full potential or if you would like to know the
steps we have been taking to get to where we are now.
As ShutterPoint grows, we look forward to constantly improving our features to accommodate the needs of our members.
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