Update August 2023: The commentary for this has been so affected by time that all I can do is scrap it and start again. If you're reading this on a site other than PBase, you'll know how I came to be here, wherever "here" is. If not, it sums up why I've had it up to the proverbial -> here <- with PBase.

In 2010, when I posted this, PBase was going through a shocking time. Not just recently; this had been going back for years. This thread from 2007 and 2008 talks about some of the issues, and at the end refers to a cryptic but sometimes alluded to "really big" PBase Phase II that Slug, the owner of the site, had apparently been dreaming about for many years without actually deploying the resources to turn it into anything more than a fantasy.

In the meantime things were breaking. As mentioned in that thread, the exif data was not being read properly resulting in bogus values being reported for flash usage, for example. One of the admins claimed that it would be fixed and be retrospective, but when I was updating the photos in this gallery I could see that it wasn't, 13 years later. PBase STILL doesn't read the exif properly because the site remains stuck in the 1990s where the only computing language was American English using ASCII values of 0 to 127, so It can't even read accented vowels in Romance languages. Nor can it read lens data, the way pretty much every other site can.

The owners (Slug in particular) rarely if ever bothered communicating with the users. It took years to implement any kind of NSFW system, meaning that the "Recent Galleries" list was overrun by "artistic" images which were closer to, and as subtle as, a gynaecological exam. By that time PBase was so widely black listed that Google largely stopped indexing it, so hardly anyone finds your images. (Pick any random image on PBase, go to Google and search for its key words, even if you use Advanced Search and use PBase.com as the site. Rarely will you find any matches from the last 10 years or so.)

Back in 2010 there were instances of servers refusing to restart after a power outage. There were really bad speed issues. Pages were randomly failing to render correctly. The stats reporting which took months to implement still failed to report reliable numbers. (And anyone who relies on PBase stats even now is living in delusion world; they bear no relation to reality.) Then they screwed up the third party StatCounter statistics system.

For some inexplicable reason PBase seems to be the only photo sharing site that is primarily based on a gallery system, meaning that photos can be annotated and grouped by theme. In my view it therefore provides the best layout, especially for those with a photojournalism / blogging bent. However I had had enough by that point and this photo announced my intention to create an account on SmugMug, which I did the following Saturday.

Unfortunately that proved to be a mistake because SmugMug is like a secret society. It doesn't have a "Recently Uploaded" list so the only way anyone ever finds, much less sees, your photos is if you ingratiate your way into a clique of mutual commenters and followers.

In 2012 I updated the original comment on this photo with "The PBase of now (2012) is not the PBase of then (2010). The administration has found a new vigour and responsiveness which has almost made it like a new site." Honestly, I can't re-read that without laughing. Not a gentle, amused laugh but a bitter, ironic laugh. For while the admins did indeed make a FEW enhancements in the early 2010s, by 2023 describing the management as vigorous and responsive rather than rude, arrogant and lazy is just not something that I can bring myself to do.

True, the servers are relatively stable these days, although the useless stats did fail for a week recently, and it took a week of support requests and forum posts before the admins even acknowledged the issue. My suspicion, which I cannot prove, is that they just have the place on autopilot and it took them a week because nobody bothered to look for a week. Why do I think them rude and arrogant? That would be from the way we raise support requests which are generally ignored, like me asking for the OM5 to be added to the camera database. 4 times. Between 5 and 6 months ago. And despite repeated follow-ups I did not even receive the basic courtesy of a non-automated reply. Why do I say lazy? What other site in the third decade of the 21st century CAN'T handle French words, much less those in other less common languages? (The individual pages can, the uploader can't. It renders a word like café as gibberish which needs to be manually corrected.) What photo site can't read the lens data from the exif?

And yet, every 2 to 3 years when they come up with some piddling, incremental change like thumbnails that are more than 300 pixels in size, they post it in the News forum, hint at Working! On! Great! New! Things! (which never eventuate), and some members fall over themselves in applause "Oh great, Emily, oh, THANK you for this munificence, Emily" as if PBase management HAVEN'T been playing Lucy to the membership's Charlie Brown and pulling the football out from under us every single time we go to kick it for the better part of 2 decades now.

The original post stated that ignoring the membership will result in the members leaving. I cannot even start to tell you how many people in the discussions linked to above are now "no such user" pages, or have galleries that were last updated 10 years ago. And I have mentioned previously how the number of photos posted each year has been in a death spiral since 2010, with each year normally seeing a double digit percentage reduction.

Who could have seen that coming? Oh, right. Me. 13 years ago. Hence the title, which also refers to a long distant and largely forgotten Mel Gibson movie.

And I am here now to remove all watermark references to PBase to prepare my galleries for upload elsewhere. The only reason that I'm still on PBase (at the time of writing at least) is that doing so is no small amount of work, and I won't get it done before my current membership expires. So they'll get another 23 bucks out of me... but after that, we'll see.