Photobucket's now a problem for forum posting!

[Barry]

It had to happen.

Following a miserable trend which started with ImageShack a while back, Photobucket is now also disallowing what they call "3rd party hosting", which means if you (like me) are using Photobucket to host your pix so that you can reference the IMG code here and other Forums or web sites, you will see a nasty notice advising that you are in violation of your current level agreement (i.e., free account).

Starting almost immediately, you will need to "upgrade" your account which will cost a minimum of USD$5.99 /month! The good news is that unlike ImageShack, you will not lose your pix. They're still accessible, just not available for reference on the Forum.

As much as I hate to recommend it, we may be forced to use the Forumotion offering which is attached to this Forum, ServImg.com. An alternative might be Google?

Merde.

[corsair]

Hmmmm... I can sort-of see their point, though - someones gotta pay for all that storage! Still.. it's a royal pita; I'm having all kinds of trouble uploading to the bucket currently...
And the last time I tried to use the forums image host, it fell over! Well, at least weird poop happened and I couldn't upload anything! I'll have another go shortly...

[Westbone]

Been using tinypic.com for a good while now due to those problems.
Same will more than likely happen in the future as it's affiliated to photobucket I think.

[Iceman]

Check out the Postimage site gents... it really is a solid alternative and a cleaner interface.

I've been using it for some time now as PB was getting clunkier for me to navigate.

https://postimages.org/

[Barry]

Thanks for the alternatives fellas. I do suspect however, that they too will eventually go the same way.

Like John says, someone has to pay for the storage costs in the end, and the use of such services has mushroomed in the past few years.

[The Chad]

It had to happen...

[Barry]

I just posted a few pix on my Spectrum LX thread using Servimg.com, the hosting facility owned by the folks who host this forum.

Went well, and no advertising clutter or popups to deal with...so far. Fingers crossed.

[Barry]

Forumotion is the host company of this Forum and posted this notice concerning Photobucket's not allowing 3rd party hosting:

Dear users,

We inform you that the hosting images service PhotoBucket, which is one of the biggest hosting service on the internet and used by a lot of Forumotion users, changed its terms of use and you have now to pay to use it.

Since the beginning of July 2017, Photobucket added fees to display the images it hosts on third-party hosting. Indeed, this service allows only the users that have a premium account on their service to see the pictures hosted there. A premium account is around 400$ / year !

More than 100 millions of internet users discovered a notification that asked them to buy a premium account to be able to use the images hosted on Photobucket or just to see them on their own website.

Images hosted on Photobucket are only displayed for the premium account and are not shown on external websites they are on, replaced by an image that invites the users to suscribe to a premium account.

To avoid any problem on Forumotion themes and forums, we are going to replace all the PhotoBucket images that are on Forumotion by an empty image.

We'll do it on the Wednesday 12 of July 2017. As a consequence, we invite all the administrators that have PhotoBucket images on their forum to change their host by hosting those images on another host, such as Servimg which stays free.

Thank you for your understanding,

Best Reguards,
The Forumotion staff

p.s.
A further notice from them:

Just to let you know Tinypic is a spin off from Photobucket and so I am told Photobucket has plans to do the same with Tinypic also.

That's why we have removed Tinypic from our systems as a side host on some forums.

Now all forums should have servimg or Imgur
If you are hosting any thing on Tinypic we advise to change it to Servimg or Imgur

[Westbone]

Yep, knew it. Got ya by the bollx! Who's gonna bother transferring all your photos over?

Mothers! Still, start, slow and 'it 'em Henry,way of the World...

[corsair]

I used the .servimg to post the pix of the lap steel; once you get your head around the different way of working, it's easy-as, eh!

Photobucket can kiss my arse - I've got years of photos on there and I sure ain't paying for a service that was touted as free so I'll lose the ability to post images into here from PB; no biggie just a pita to lose the pix in here that not just me but everyone has hosted on PB. Utter wankers, even if I understand the commercial realities at play...

[Barry]

The impact on this forum is bad enough, but considering the 100 million subscribers and the large percentage of them doing what we're doing, it amounts to a staggering loss of pictoral information.

It would not have been so bad if they had even had the decency to leave those already linked but stopped supporting any new posts. What a friggin' shame.

[Barry]

I discovered a few broken images in my guitar files on my own computer so I looked around to see if I had any backup copies. I didn't.

So I checked Photobucket and was happy to find copies there. I copied them down. All good. Then I decided to download some of my Albums using their download album option.

All apparently went well as the dialog box indicated things were working in the background and they'd notify me by email when it was ready.

Got the email. Clicked on the download button only to get the message "download link no longer available"! It's supposed to be available for 24 hrs.

Tried again, different album. Same results. Reading several posts on the interwebs confirmed that Photobucket is indeed blocking this function. The only way to retrieve your pictures is to view your album online then right click/save image, one by one!

Lots of upset over the way Photobucket has behaved. When you consider 100+ million subscribers and over a billion images, that's a major disruptive force in the electronic universe.

[corsair]

You'd think the louse-bound gits would let you retrieve your photos, eh!! 

[DimensionIV-addict]

Sounds like Ransom Bucket to me...

[Barry]

As Forumotion promised, they have now replaced all Photobucket image links with a blank image.

Instead of seeing that ugly grey violation notice and a message to upgrade your account, your post now just has a space where the picture used to be.

That makes it more tolerable to read, but of course we have no pictures to go with the description! This is devastating for a niche forum such as ours. I haven't gone through the whole site of course but it now makes it very difficult to check archives, make comparisons, etc. A tremendous amount of information has been lost.

Thank goodness we still have our own website so not everything is gone, but the question now is, "can we rebuild some of the posts?" I'm attempting to fix some of mine but it's tedious work. God, what a f*****g mess!

[Barry]

Man, it's hard keeping up with all the fallout from all of Photobucket's nonsense.
But at least there is a small improvement since the last post.

Forumotion has realized that some users may in fact have a paid subscription to a PB account making their links "legal". Their initial plan to trash all PB links and replace with blank images would have also prevented these users from seeing their images.

An option was added to the Administrator's panel to either continue with the blank links or re-instate the original PB links. I have opted to reestablish the PB links.

This means that if you have a paid account or your account has not been affected yet you will continue see your images and you have the opportunity to save your post complete with images, or optionally you can find the image location in your PB library using the URL and save it from there.

If your account has been disabled by PB you will see their ugly graphic replacing your images.

I hope this helps a little bit.
If you can see 'em, save 'em while you can!

[corsair]

Honestly, mate, life's too f*****g short to shag about trying to put images back into posts from 2009, or whenever, eh! 
In fact, once I'd uploaded in PB, I generally deleted the images completely from my systems, bastards!
If anyone wants to see anything I've got, then I'm only too happy to use the .servimg in here to post such images...

[Barry]

I know, believe me Johnny, at my age I get it! It's the historical record and continuity I'm thinking about.

Many members have come and gone in the past 10 years or so, and they've contributed invaluable discussions and pictorial references. Those folks are not around to consult or ask for pictures. Only their records exist to help us out.

The next bunch of Westone fanatics will be basically scratching their heads and starting over.

[corsair]

I know, I know.... losing those early images to corporate greed is a nasty hit to a boutique site like this and makes the site just that little bit less useful to newcomers, especially in the technical sub forum.

Short of going through every post I've ever made and repairing what I can, I can't see a fix! And to lose images from members gone but not forgotten is unforgivable...

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