Our New Digital Grin Refugee Friends

[DavidWatts]

You may be noticing the “Digital Grin Refugee” banner under some member’s avatars lately, and might ask “What is that and who are these people?"

The Digital Grin (Dgrin) photography forum was created by the photo hosting company Smugmug in early 2004 as one method (of many) to field questions and answers from customers and prospective customers. Very quickly Dgrin grew to become a popular photography posting forum community, like it is here, and a fairly large one at that! Somewhat later, Smugmug’s user support moved primarily to a direct company email system, leaving that portion of the forum largely unused. Since Dgrin’s heyday around 2012, the user numbers and photo posts had been slowly dropping. In January 2025, Smugmug decided to close the forum.

The user migration from Digital Grin forum began earlier than that; some to POTN when it was still active, and also to other photography specific forums and to various social networks. Many ex-Dgrinner’s have come into our Focus on Photography Forum and have been warmly received by all of you. Thank You! Please visit the Welcome to Focus on Photography Forum thread at the top of the forum listings to read some of the new incoming member's posts and get to know our new friends better. I am amazed and proud that many have quickly began posting amazing images and have navigated about the place like they’ve been here for months already.

A while ago, when many POTN members were transitioning into our forum here, we began adding banners to their avatars that read "POTN Refugee."

 

[Baan]

Thanks for the history of The Digital Grin history David. Where did the Grin come from? The smiley on the logo?

Welcome Digital Grin members!! I hope you all settle into this forum well and make it your new home.

Please note: the "Digital Grin Refugee" titles will be gone after 200 posts and the regular member title will be displayed. If you would like to carry on the Digital Grin Refugee, you may do so in your signature.

Any questions or suggestions you may have, please feel free and don't hesitate to ask.

 

[paddler4]

It's sad. years ago I frequented Digital Grin, and I learned a lot (primarily about macro) there. However, traffic seemed to be dropping off for several years before the end, to the point where I no longer followed it.

 

[DavidWatts]

Thanks for the history of The Digital Grin history David. Where did the Grin come from? The smiley on the logo?

I actually don't know about the grin part. That was the creation of the early Smugmug Team and Andy, the COO at the time, and who was one of the first three people creating the forum in January 2004. There are a couple people over here now that were also very early Dgrin testers. I was recruited by Andy in December 2004, and was a refugee of sorts from the DPR forums where I was summarily banned by the DPR owner (Phil) for reporting a spammer! I had maybe 3,000 posts there at the time. Andy was also posting at DPR and then we all switched over to Dgrin. It grew large, but as things go in the internet of things, a long life is not assured.

Hey, I see we have had several more Dgrin Refugees joining us in this last week.

 

[pegelli]

Believe it or not, DGrin is still working, just posted a test image there this morning. I think we all abandoned ship before it really sunk

The good thing is that this forum is much more active.

 

[DavidWatts]

Believe it or not, DGrin is still working, just posted a test image there this morning. I think we all abandoned ship before it really sunk

The good thing is that this forum is much more active.

Yes, I check it every day too. One of these days it will just be a redirect page to ?.

 

[sapphire73]

Checked the old Dgrin site again the other day, and there doesn't seem to be any redirect at this point. However, Internet Archive seems to have captured a lot of the pages.