Idea time again :-)

Well a lot less serious than the previous post!

Basically, remember the beta thing on the pages with the image thumbnails? Well I hope so as it's there on every page basically (with possible exception for Opera users)! Anyway, with the old design it used to show the rating of the image.

However, due to the more complex stuff used on the site now, it'd need a lot more processing in order to achieve the same thing now, and with the server already under strain I don't want to make it any worse, so am not adding this back just yet.

So...how about I replace the rating bit in it with...a baby avatar pic of the user!? If they have one that is. It'll allow you to see who sent the pic in without opening a new page up too.

I'll be messing around a bit with it anyway, so keep an eye out.

Thoughts on a postcard, or just post up a comment here ;-)

Serious news time folks

As you might've noticed, mobMMS is free to use, had no ads or sponsors, and therefore makes no income, which would be fine except the costs of keeping the site up and running are spiralling up each month which is making my bank balance look rather worrying!

I've been trying to think of ways to keep the site as it is, but to somehow try and get some ££ back to cover these costs.

We had been relying on mobMMS's big brother site to pay for its running (mob453.com, but alas, due to reasons I won't go into here, it's currently doing ringtones free of charge too, leaving zero income but huge bills still! :-(

Obviously I can't keep it running this way as a negative bank balance won't keep a site up, so I've come up with the following possible solutions:

1. charge for a WAP site
   eg charge something like £1 (or equivalent amount in different countries, ~$2/€1.5) a month for access to the full downloads of vids and images


2. subscription fee
   maybe a small subscription fee for members who will get benefits non-paying members don't.


3. pay per download, sender gets %age
   But, I quite like the idea of setting up a wap site where people pay per download, but the sender of the image/video gets a percentage of the amount charged too, and that's what I think I’m going to try and set up. So the more people upload, the more money they'll make themselves! ...Although I'll need hundreds of people to do so in order to cover the server costs! But at least the community will be getting back what they put in as well, whilst hopefully allowing us to cover the costs of keeping running!

Still trying to decide about the above, so now's your chance to give your views/feedback/suggestions/ideas/etc before it's too late and I start work on one of the above!!

Oooh some good news finally!

It's taken a while, but...yes...that's right...

The "Most Popular" pages are back in action!! :-D Enjoy!

Ok this blog thing is weird I really need to get to grips with it properly one day!

More updates:

1. Problems sending pics in to your album address when using your phone email?
Some people seem to be having problems sending photos in using the email program that came with their phones. It's not a problem with mobMMS, but seems to be a bug in the email software. For some reason it doesn't seem to like the @pics.mobmms.com bit...or in fact any email address with a subdomain in it...go figure!
Got me stumped as it's completely valid as an email addy (my Pipex one was @dsl.pipex.com), so I'm not sure there's much I can do to fix that unfortunately.

I would therefore suggest that if you have problems with the phone email, try sending it as an MMS. That will definitely work and help you to rule out other problems. We also have a free method of sending in MMS messages, but I've not updated it to work with the new site just yet...

First annoucement I'll start with is the good stuff:

1. New smileys!
I added a whole kaboodle of new smileys today - I'm sure some are going to get used a little more than others though... ;-)

2. The "Latest Comments" page:
This is now working properly! No more random amounts of replies per page, or even pages with nothing on...all nice and functional again now :-)

Only minor problem is a bug from porting all the stuff over from the old design and database meant that older posts are displayed in a messed up order until a new reply is made. I probably could find a way to solve this but it would take a serious amount of time for not really a great deal of benefit.

3. The "Most Popular" page...
Yes, I know it's still broken, but I didn't see the point in rushing to fix it because all hit counters for the images were reset when the new theme went live, so am just waiting a while for some pics/vids to get a decent number of views. Expect to see it's return at the weekend.

4. Profile page:
I also know the link to user profiles isn't up there just yet. I might sort this out tonight if I have time, otherwise it'll happen in the next few days. That whole page needs updating though so it's not finished yet by any means.


Well, that's your lot for today. Getting tired now and the other posts need to go into more detail about slightly more complex stuff, so I'll bore you all with that at some other date!

aleco
mobMMS.com

It had to be done, the inevitable "first post" of a blog (my first ever blog too).

So, what's this for?

Well, it's supposed to be an area located off our mobMMS server (which has suffered the occasional downtime ;-) ...so hopefully this'll be up if that isn't!) to keep everyone up-to-date and informed about goings on/updates/downtime/ideas etc. and to maybe receive feedback on them!

Now that this post is out the way, onto the real content!