June 2023 update
Support for auto-renewing subscriptions completed
At the beginning of June, work to add support for auto-renewing subscription was completed.
These are the most important points:
There are no price increases. Prices are based on the following principles:
Lite is still CHF 20
Premium is still CHF 40
Ultimate is still CHF 60
When prices are converted to other currencies, they are rounded up to the next 0.50 for yearly payments (same as before), and the next 0.25 for monthly payments.
If you have bought a non-automatically recurring subscription in the last 2 years, you may continue to do so.
Monthly subscriptions are about 20% more expensive than yearly subscriptions. You can cancel your monthly subscription if you don't image during the summer because of lack of darkness or other reasons, and AstroBin won't delete anything. In fact, AstroBin never deletes anything any time there's a gap in a subscription, or if you stop paying forever, unless you choose to delete something.
AstroBin will be cheaper in certain countries. I'm using the list of countries sorted by GDP per capita and the top 25% countries get the full price; the next 25% countries get a 25% discount, and the bottom 50% countries get a 50% discount. I hope this is fair.
GDPR compliance improved
Thanks to some help by a fantastic AstroBin user who spent a lot of time helping me, I was finally able to address some gaping holes in AstroBin's compliance to GDPR. I apologies for the fact that I was obviously late in this.
The salient points are as follows:
AstroBin now has a GDPR compliant cookie banner.
Cookie consent is nowsplit in sections (essential cookies, functional cookies, analytics cookies, advertising cookies...)
AstroBin now has a privacy policy and a cookie policy. Please read them.
If you have any questions about your privacy on AstroBin, please get in touch!
IOTD/TP stats available for transparency
In order to provide even more transparency to the IOTD/TP process, which is fully documented on the Image Of The Day Manifesto, I added some stats.
You can access the data by clicking on the chart icon in the header on top of any image of the day. It pertains the past 365 days and is updated every day.
There are three blocks of data:
Distribution of astrophotographers
It shows how many distinct astrophotographers have been awarded with an IOTD, Top Pick, or Top Pick Nomination, compared to the total number of awarded images. This is to show that the IOTD/TP is not monopolized by a handful of astrophotographers.Distribution of subject types
It shows the percentages of images by each subject type (deep sky, solar system, etc) that were awarded, compared to the percentage of images of that subject type submitted to the IOTD/TP process. This is to show that no subject type is grossly over or under-represented.Distribution of data sources
It shows the percentages of images by each data source (backyard, traveller, own remote observatory, etc) that were awarded, compared to the percentage of images of that data source submitted to the IOTD/TP process. This indicates that images acquired at a remote observatory with personally owned equipment are over-represented, while backyard images are under-represented. Personally, I don't find this surprising: people who own a remote observatory have probably invested more money in the equipment, and more time in the craft, on average, and it's no wonder that their images are awarded more often. In contrast, images acquired with rented time or downloaded data from remote hosting facilities, don't seem to be over-represented.
Obviously, the distribution of awards doesn't exactly match the distribution of submitted images: AstroBin does not enforce IOTD/TP quotas in order to match distributions.
However, at least in my opinion, no category is grossly over or under- represented, with the exception of backyard and own remote observatory, which has an obvious and in my opinion reasonable expalanation (see above).
This shows that the IOTD/TP process works well.
Improved forum selection workow to encourage posting in equipment specic forums
On AstroBin, every equipment item implicitly has its own dedicated forum. When you create a new topic in that forum, all users who have used that equipment item in the past get a notification about the new topic (unless they opted out in the notification settings, of course).
This allows us to build communities around equipment items, and to quickly get responses to questions or problems that you might have with an equipment item.
This has been working really well, because I often see equipment related posts being created, and receiving dozens of replies within a few hours.
In June, I have improved the forum selection process, so that it's easier to find the forum pertaining a specific equipment item and get more relevant replies to your questions.
Additionally, I added support for moving topics to a different forums, so I can do it for you, as an administrator, if required.
Other changes worth mentioning
As always, thanks to your feedback, I've implemented several bug fixes and minor improvements.
Here's the bug fixes and small improvements in June, in no particular order:
Added support for downsample_factor and use_sextractor options to the basic plate-solving.
The @ character may not be used anymore for usernames in new accounts. Existing accounts that have this symbol in the username are not affected by this.
Fixed an issue where the advanced plate-solving annotations were still shown on the full-size view of images even if the mouse-hover property was set to Nothing.
Moved some files from external CDNs to the internal one, to improve deliverability.
Fixed gallery image counter to include collaborations.
Improved some aspects of the authentication workflow, to add more information about the OTP token.
Made the asynchronous tasks architecture more robust: now the worker servers automatically scale up and down depending on the size of the queue: this fixes the issue that sometimes (2-3 times a year, from memory) a worker server crashed and emails and other async tasks would pile up until I noticed and restarted it.
Fixed things so that no notifications by shadow-banned users make their way to you.
Added support for sub 1ms exposure time in solar system acquisitions.
Improved some error reporting in the image data editor form.
Fixed issue where you could create an empty equipment edit proposal.
Improved formatting and added some action buttons to equipment popovers. Additionally, added a delay before them appear on mouse- hover.
Added option to disable slide-in transitions in slideshows.
Allow log in with "real name" when it's unambiguous.
As usual, several security improvements, dependency upgrades, and small UI improvements.