I’ve seen this mentioned in other posts, but there has been no official response. The stats for my galley are completely wrong, and it seems that I am not the only one. I have a rather modest gallery ( …. OK ….. ummm …… compared to most it’s a tiny gallery) and I was rather proud of the statistics it had. I had just over 50 images, and over 50,000 views (don’t know the exact number’s now – cause it’s gone). The image with the most views at over 1,800 now has ZERO views. I had several with over 1,500 views that are now also at ZERO! In fact, most of my images now show zero.

Will this be corrected in the next week or so, or did you lose all of the old information (my first gallery post was in 2005)?

Rant on ----
If it is now lost (as I am guessing it is), why didn’t you inform users prior to the big change over what was going to happen so they could get the info they would like to keep before it was lost? If it is lost, and this was an oversite on the part of the programming staff (or contractor), that really is not an acceptable excuse. NO site should go live with the number of issues you have had here – this is the voice of experience talking (I have been in the IT Industry for 29 years, and a CIO/IT Director for 13 years). Many of the issues I’ve seen with the new site, including the wacked out gallery stats, show either a complete lack of attention to detail, or a lack of caring on the part of the leadership (IT/Web leadership and/or Management).

The image size/dimension restrictions seem rather poorly investigated/vetted as well. Only portrait size format for an art gallery – really? Now I realize that this probably makes it easier to program for tablet/phone viewing, but your customers (gallery users) work on real computers, not phones and tablets. Are your web programmers and management so far removed from the Rendo community (or what’s left of the Rendo community) that they really didn’t see this as being a big issue?

Markdown language for the forums …….. SERIOUSLY???? The trend for the last 10 years for forums – or anything on the web that has significant text entry (other than simple formats like Twitter) has been to provide a user interface that doesn’t require any programming/coding/scripting skill on the part of the user. Once again, this shows a complete lack of understanding that the user experience is important, and the more user friendly something is, the more it gets used. Unless of course your ultimate goal is to chase forum users away so the forums die a natural death rather that Rendo just removing them.

Continued Rant – General site decline
IMHO Renderosity used to be the best 3D content site on the web. Great products, outstanding galleries, and it had fun and informative forums. But over the past few years Rendo has slowly declined, a decline that seemed to coincide with the introduction of DS4.x and Genesis.

With the introduction of Genesis the Poser forum here got very ugly, and several of the forums here turned into the place where anyone who had issues with DAZ3D (or hated DAZ3D) would come to post and hate. To say I was amazed at the level Rendo was allowing this to continue is a bit of an understatement, my only thought was “They do realize that a significant portion of their income comes from addons to DAZ3D figures don’t they?”. The continual bickering and hating ran many forum members off (and probably a bit of revenue too). True, there has been an effort to change this over the past 2-3 years, with what finally seems like a true effort to make the forums positive (though the site “Revolution” here that continues to make the forums less usable and user friendly are no doubt making this goal even more difficult). The forums simply aren’t what they once were, and to be perfectly honest, they were user unfriendly before this latest “upgrade”, and now they have moved back 10-15 years with the loss of GUI base editing in favor of “Markdown” language ….. sorry but WTF???

Then there was the broken “Most Viewed”, “Most Commented”, etc. galleries. For almost two years these gallery features were not functional, now they are gone and replaced with something that is also broken because the gallery stats are broken! These features not working properly had a definite impact on how many images I posted here, and I’m guessing that they also had a similar effect on others, especially those like me, who don’t post a lot of images, but their images are often good enough to make it into the “Most Viewed for the last 45 days” category. For people like me who are not very prolific in terms of the number of images produced, this was really the only way our art (in my case I’m using the term art very loosely) could get noticed. It may be just my own bias, but it seems to me that many of the top artists either slowed their image postings, or virtually stopped posting images here due to this seemingly minor issue. Regardless, IMHO the number of high quality images in the galleries here has declined significantly over the past 2 years. I came to Rendo and got highly interested in Poser and 3D art because of the Galleries here, without the galleries, I may never have bought a thing here.

Then there was the issue of the store being “hacked”. I don’t know about anyone else, but I have not made a purchase here since this happened. My lack of purchases isn’t because credit card information was getting “skimmed” when people made purchases. Being in IT for so long, and having web sites where payments are made, I fully understand how difficult keeping the hackers at bay is. It was the response of Rendo staff (and some obviously rather arrogant IT/Web staff) that has given me pause, and kept me from making any purchases. Even when it was rather obvious from the forum posts that there had to be some sort of system breach at Rendo, staff kept denying that the problem could be here. It was only after it became totally and blatantly undeniable that Rendo actually allocated enough resources (or forced the IT/Web staff to find the problem) that the hack was discovered. This is exactly the opposite attitude I have taken any time a customer has had any reason to believe any of the systems I have been responsible for have been compromised. For any place on the web where financial transactions are made, trust IS the #1 most important thing. You lost my trust with the way you responded to the issue, and I was about to begin purchasing here again, but this latest “Revolution” has dissuaded my trust yet again.

Of course we also have the site “upgrades” over the past few years. Sure, any upgrade/change will have a few challenges, and a negative reaction by people who tend to dislike change. However, many issues fail to get fixed before the next “upgrade”, which either just passes on the problem, actually makes the issue worse, or creates more issues in addition to the old ones. The messed up forum functionality is a prime example, thread navigation and ebots have not been up to snuff for quite a while now. With the new update posting has also gone backwards.

Any one of these issues alone may not be a big deal. But when combined has a whole (and with the many other “little” issues) they begin to add up, and they do two things. One, they tell your users and customers that while you say you care, all you really care about is your bottom line (I do believe that many of the staff we interact with do really care – but they are powerless to make any real changes). Two, I hate to say this, because I don’t know the actual situation, but the impression left is real so here goes - this really does give the impression of either a money hungry (profits at any cost) or a failing company.
Rant Off

I realize that this post may get removed, and I honestly hate making any post like this – but PLEASE pass it on to the decision makers if you must remove it. I don’t want Rendo to die, and it’s difficult for me to see a place I once loved because I thought it was the best 3D content site on the Web, continue to decline at an ever increasing rate. Of course this is just my opinion, and I may well be completely wrong.

Regardless, it would be nice to know if the old gallery stats will be fixed, of if they gone with the winds of change.

PS: Whats up with the inability to use an apostrophe, quotes, etc.? I just looked at the preview and what a mess. This is not a user friendly feature

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My Rendo Gallery ........ My DAZ3D Gallery ........... My DA Gallery ......