500px has completely denied my refund!

They say I can’t get a refund after signing up for 30 days, but they completely changed the functionality of there site, removing the friends new photos RSS feed, which is the main thing that created the online community. Yes they have returned friends photos, but it is constantly updating and you can never figure out which photos you have seen, and which you have not.

I can’t understand removing functionality from a site, only adding to it, but they have removed functionality and I am pissed off that they will not refund my money.

I got an e-mail response from 500px for my request for a refund and they have denied it.

Hello,

Sorry about the lack of response from your previous email . We had thousands of responses and yours must have slipped through the cracks! So sorry!

We have enabled again: The wall, Friend’s photos, your profile landing page as your own images, and we will also be bringing back Activity. As for the RSS feeds, I have forwarded your request to the developers.

As for the refund, we have clearly stated in the terms that refunds are only available within 30 days after the purchase.

If you need any further help, please let me know.

I responded with:

Yes, but you did not remove functionality of the site within the 30 day window, you did it with this update. I was paying for a site with certain functionality and now it is gone. This is no longer the same site.

I loved this site, and thought I would have a paid account forever, but you have lost me as a paid customer for good now.

I find this totally unacceptable, especially since they have refused to return the friends RSS feed to the site, which was the perfect way to follow your friends photos and never have to see the same photo twice. Without it, you never know how many you have missed or are sure that you have seen them all.

They have made the site useless, and I am no longer actively participating and am considering deleting my account completely. I find it unacceptable that they refuse my refund when they have changed the functionality of their web site.

And even better no response to my first or second e-mail to support. At this point even if they do add back the friends RSS feed, I want a refund of the rest of my subscription because they are just ignoring the e-mails of a paid customer! That is not customer service and is totally unacceptable!

500PX removed the features I found most useful on their site, and though they have put some back, they have not put them all back. It is time for my to contact my bank in getting back a refund, because 500px won’t even respond to me.

Well looks 500px is getting enough negative feedback that they are making some changes.

Now when you click on a person’s profile the first thing you get is their pictures and not the flow, which is a vast improvement, but still not perfect, as I would like to be able to say what people see about me. If they only see my pictures, or if I let them see my pictures and activities as well. This is a privacy concern to me and I wish they would fix it, but it looks like they won’t.

Second friends are back, or at least half back. There is now a page that shows your friends new photos, but there is not an RSS feed for it. So you have to go to your web site to see new photos, and it constantly updates and is impossible to jump in where you previously were (which was why the RSS feed was the perfect way for this to work).

And to me the big piss off is that they have not responded at all to my request for a refund, even with a negative. I assume they are adding new features and trying to wait people out, but the no response makes me even more angry.

This was such a great site, and while it is closer to what it was, it is still broken. And if they don’t return the friend functionality I still want a refund.

I just sent the following to 500px.

I would like to cancel my Awesome Pro Account and get a refund for the remaining 5 months

I want to do this because of your changes to the site. I feel that the feature changes have made it so that this is not the site that I signed up for, and that I deserve to get my a refund of the money for the last 5 months of the subscription.

First off I feel that flow is completely unprofessional. If I send someone to see my photos, I do want them to see flow, I want them to see my gallery! In fact I think I should be able to restrict others from seeing my flow or my favorites at all, but at least when it went to my photos first I felt like the site felt professional, now it is much more of just a social photo finding device.

And the other thing that has ruined this site for me is the removal of the friends page and friends RSS feed. I used this site to subscribe to my friends and guarantee that I would be able to see there newly uploaded photos. I always knew how many I had to view and my rss reader would make them read once I viewed them. The 500px page is not a replacement! It only show a small amount of photos on a page, there is no way to have marked the ones I have seen read, and even worse is the more function! Now if I click on a photo after I have hit more, when I go back, it brings me back to the first page of photos before I hit more! Are you kidding me? This is horrible and a huge step backwards. In fact it is so bad that I am considering deleting my account all together!

You had created this great site, with a lot of great features, and a great community that supported each other, and in one fells swoop you have erased that community and made your site a whole lot less professional and a whole lot less usable. Please consider going back to the old site design, and maybe some of us will stick around, otherwise, it looks like it is time for me to consider moving to SmugMug.

Wow, it is so sad to see a great site go down the tubes! 500px has quickly become the premier photography web site in the world. Where you can post and view the best photos from great photographers everywhere.

The problem is that they updated the site yesterday and basically completely broke everything that was good about it!

First off, now when you go to a photographers link instead of seeing their pictures you go to a new thing called flow, which is basically facebook’s timeline for activity on the site, so you are seeing the photos that the photographer has seen and liked instead of their photos. Well this is about the least professional thing I can think of. I don’t want to send people to my photos and have them see the photos that I like, I want them to see my photos. I can see having the option to see the photos that I like as a part of a social network, but honestly that should be able to be turned off if you don’t want people to know your taste in photos! And there is no reason it should be the first page people are brought too.

And equally as annoying they have removed the friends page and rss feed completely. Previously you could follow people on the site and it would add them to your friends page, and you could follow that RSS feed in your favorite RSS reader and you would see all the new photos that your friends have uploaded, and be able to keep up on them, see how many there were, and never miss a photo. Now this feed is completely broken, and the friends page has been removed. Now the only way to see your friends new photos is to go to the 500px front page, and if you are logged in it shows your friends most recent photos, but only a pages worth, with a more at the bottom, but if you click more, then on a photo and go back, you go back to the first page of photos, and there is no way to have marked the ones you have seen as read (which you could with the RSS feed) or know which ones you have missed if you did not have time to go through the web site to find them. Honestly this completely breaks the whole community aspect of the web site, and makes the site almost completely useless!

Honestly I am considering deleting my account, because they have ruined the best things about this site completely!