PBase.com: Usability and Sociability

According to Jenny Preece's Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability, there is a simple checklist for determining the effectiveness and presence of sociability and usability on a website. I will first apply this checklist and later go into the details of what constitutes effective sociability and usability and how PBase fits into these categories.

Checklist for Sociability and Usability for PBase.com

1. Why should I join this community?

• To host your online photos
• To share your photos with friends, family, and other users
• To receive criticism or comments on your work
• To garner publicity via the popular galleries and image areas
• To meet other photographers
• To get advice on specific photography questions

• Register - free 31 day trial period with 10 MB of space
• Can post on forums as a guest
• Subscribe - 2 types of subscription plans
• To leave, write an email to support asking for account deletion
  

• Official Rules - Terms of Service
• Unofficial Rules - Forum
• Ex: Tips for Posting on this Forum for the Show and Tell forum

• Go to the forum or image/gallery you want to comment on and write as a guest or
• Register/Subscribe

• Yes.
• the upload form lets you easily choose one or multiple images to upload
• If you want to leave a comment or guestbook post all you have to do is click a link and write away
• You don't have to be a registered user to ask questions on the forum. Just click to start a topic.

• You only put as much personal information as you like - users post a range from nothing to nearly everything except social security number
• Password protected and non-public galleries - BUT according to the Terms of Service, PBase doesn't guarantee privacy - " If it is important that an image should not be seen by the public, do not put it on PBASE" since users can circumvent safety features.

• To an extent.
• Terms of Service - Pornography and copyrighted images (that are not the users') can and will be removed.
• Photos with nudity are taken off public areas of the site.
• Offensive threads in the forum can be deleted or locked.

• A large variety of active forum topics with experience photographers.
• Many users like the exposure hosting gets them on Google and other search engines as opposed to personal websites.

Content
PBase has the option of taking down images or content that it deems inappropriate at anytime without notice though notice is often given. Most of the time, an email is sent asking a user to take down offensive images themselves before PBase admins do it for them.

Forum
On matters of abusive or legal issues surrounding forum posts, users should contact a PBase administrator, not moderators or writers of the forum software.

Usability: Software

Forum
The PBase forum uses software from phpBB group which is made available under the GNU General Public License and may be freely distributed. Any problems concerning the forum are not to be sent to the programmers but rather the PBase administrators. If a user wants to request a new feature for forum software, they should contact phpBB and leave their suggestion.

What is phpBB?
According to phpBB.com, the software is a customizable, open source bulletin board package. The software is written by programmers who believe in open source software and the importance of stable, user-friendly forums.