Sorry been away for so long guys, we did some shifting of people within the organization and it gives me a little more time to help with certain issues within the site.
So lets start with this topic, RaceSpace galleries.
You are correct that we did not make the profiles private, we did however make the galleries fall inline with our privacy policies.
How this all came to be.
As you know images in the galleries sometimes get a little over the top, we don't monitor the images unless we get a report. Once we get a report we take appropriate action to keep the images within the posting agreement. One person who was upset with his images getting reported wondered why someone who was not a friend could even see his images, well we wondered the same thing as we looked into the account, because it was always meant to be friends first to see images. Once we found out that we had a glitch in the system that was allowing non-friends looking at personal images we took corrective action to fix this error.
We didn't stop anyone from looking at pictures, you just had to be a friend first.
Not realizing the back lash of what people were really looking at the galleries for didn't become apparent until we did this. Let me explain. Right after we did this people were saying that they were looking at pictures of ads that were being posted in the albums, they didn't want to have to become friends of someone to look at pictures of their ads. We were a little disappointed in this because the RaceSpace profiles were not meant to be a replacement for an actual classified ad gallery upgrade. So we found the majority of complaining was going on from people who seemed a little duped that they had to take this extra step because someone was... well I don't want to say "cheating the system" but you can see where I'm going with this. Let's call it using the systems we put in place to avoid something else, and that's OK. I would probably do the same thing given the opportunity.
Having said that, we are NOT stopping this practice at all, people can still do that and we now realize that people are going to do that, but they will have to now just do that within the privacy policies of the racespace, friends first.
Some people are saying that we did this FOR this reason, and that is not the case at all, obviously we are not going to let anyone know who that person was that initially had this friends / image question, but this person did help us find this glitch, that allowed us to make our programming match our policies.
We hope this helps you understand why the site changed in this manner on this issue.
Please keep the questions coming, and after you post one please just shoot me an email to
[email protected] so I know that there is one to take a look at. I can't always be certain that I get time to get into the Forums section but I will try.