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April 7, 2024
Your help is vital
With your help participating in our current fundraising, we are able to continue operate the Nikonians community while providing new content and features.
Maintaining a platform like Nikonians is not for free and we have decided against increasing the membership fees for now. These have been on the same level since we introduced them in late 2003.
There are some larger chunks of functionality we want to roll out, one that has been on the back burner since we used it in a beta testing period in 2019, allows for sharing large files (e.g. jpeg, raw, videos and other files) within the community and for members to share with others outside of the community as well. We launched that beta for a smaller group of members testing it back then, but decided after the beta period against going public, which kind of hurt but was the right decision. The technology we used was in the end not fulfilling the requirements we had, something which now seems to have been solved by the developers behind that solution. It requires integration with our platform prior of being usable (e.g. authentication, authorization, some design aspects).
Two other items relate to applications to make it easier to 1) interact with other members and stay up-to-date on what is going on in the community (partially replacing the defunct mobile gallery app and ezine apps) and 2) to upload and comment on images. For example, right now we have a Mac application for batch image uploading, but we do not have anything equal for Windows and there is no plugin for Adobe products to do the same either. Latter potentially not that high in priority though. The windows support here is really high up, even if our plain web based upload is way better than it used to be.
Next year we will acquire new servers (a serious allocation for us since we own and do not lease or rent our stuff), but that is then for the fundraising in 2025, our 25th anniversary fund raising event.
More on the maintenance of Nikonians
We are using a feature request and bug issue tracking system called Jira. We are managing all the entries in that system, which is not public. The latest entry is labelled NIKDPL-5975, where 5975 is a sequential number. A large number of these entries have been fixed, rolled out or discarded over the years and we have a total of 911 entries that are currently either "open" (not fixed, not done) or which are currently being worked on (flagged as "in progress"). Many are small improvements, some are bug fixes.
With additional funds we are able to speed up the amount of items we can approach and roll out.
Content and educational material
A part of the funds are intended to be used to grow the team of authors at Nikonians, we are also very keen on seeing more video material being created. These two areas are then not related to any new functionality being rolled out, but simply ensuring that we are getting new, good learning material.
Thanks for reading. Any amount helps. Visit the Fundraising Campaign 2024
Posted by bgs at April 7, 2024 7:03 PM