Photobucket Goes Rogue

Ballen Photo wrote in post #18391742
Not so sure about this being written by an alarmist? I have suddenly been seeing the speedometer place holders showing up all over the web, as well as a lot of PB users **** about the changes.
FWIW, I don't use PB, and never have.

Without knowing the utilization profiles pertaining to the folks being hit with those 'speedometer place holders', it still could be alarmist in terms of NOT applying to folks like me who have very low volume of used server capacity that was allocated to each member.
Any increase in membership cost might simply be related to server costs escalating , and passing on the increased cost to the highest consumers of server storage. The dead-end free forum links might be a very clumsy way of convincing the high storage users to pay something more commensurate to their usage.

Wilt wrote in post #18391747
The dead-end free forum links might be a very clumsy way of convincing the high storage users to pay something more commensurate to their usage.

High storage? I don't know about that. My Photobucket links at POTN died, and my storage at P'bucket has stood at 1.0 K for a long time.

Wilt wrote in post #18391747
Without knowing the utilization profiles pertaining to the folks being hit with those 'speedometer place holders', it still could be alarmist in terms of NOT applying to folks like me who have very low volume of used server capacity that was allocated to each member.
Any increase in membership cost might simply be related to server costs escalating , and passing on the increased cost to the highest consumers of server storage. The dead-end free forum links might be a very clumsy way of convincing the high storage users to pay something more commensurate to their usage.

Did you not see where I posted, "I used 10% of the free hosting & it looks like they slammed my account too."?

PhotosGuy wrote in post #18391784
Did you not see where I posted, "I used 10% of the free hosting & it looks like they slammed my account too."?

I saw your post. But not being aware of how much/how little of your membership allocation was used...

10% of 2GB, or
10% of 600GB

(I use 31% of only 2GB). I didn't apply 'free hosting' to mean the 2GB account like me.
So I did not jump to any conclusion about how much or how little burden on server capacity you had placed upon Photobucket. I only know that my paltry use of Photobucket for forum links is still functioning, and Photobucket has not tried to hit me up to upgrade my account. When we see that my link in post 14 of this thread has gone dead, we all will know that I have been struck silent, too!

8% of 2GB and links are gone for me too.

Forunately I didn't make much use of PB, as I hated the interface (ads, flash) which regularly froze one of my computers.

I have restored most of my affected images here on POTN, except for those where I had included more than 2 in one post.

Honestly after this stunt I'll be amazed if the site lasts to the end of the year; if it does chances are hardly any will be using it*. There are just so many other alternative better choices for both casual and serious uploaders. The only ones who will really be affected are those hosting archive stuff and chances are those who are still around and active will just move stuff over to another host.

*or it will just be such a spammy feast of ads that it will appear like a scam-site rather than its once legitimate status.

I only used 3% of free account. Every site I posted links at has a nice a blocked link now.

Their server, their rules so I will be deleting my account now. Pretty crappy way do it. I guess having 500 pop ups and ads every time you go to their site wasn't enough to keep it free.

Wow.

There is a long discussion about this in http://blog.photobucke​t.com …/comment-page-1/#comments

New TOS is linked in http://blog.photobucke​t.com/update-terms-service/

"The free account does not allow any image linking or 3rd party image hosting."

What they have done is really not good practice, all embedded image show an "ad" instead, and their clients need to pay to get the images displayed correctly!

Remember that if you want to restore the important images in your posts, you may edit the post and upload those here instead (2 per post).
They will always show here, no matter what.

Hopefully Photobucket will loosen their embed restrictions after a while, people seem to be very angry about it.

Pekka wrote in post #18392299
Remember that if you want to restore the important images in your posts, you may edit the post and upload those here instead (2 per post).
They will always show here, no matter what.

Very much appreciate it.

Wilt wrote in post #18391717
Methinks this thread is the result of an article, the offshoot of an alarmist writer...

Here is the current Photobucket web page of membership options

I don't use Photobucket commercially in any manner, I only use it to post illustrations in threads on various forums, and have not been 'slammed' or approached to up my status from merely paying to be 'ad free'. In over 10 years of posting, I have only used 0.6GB of my free 2.0GB, and the $39.99 account provides over 500GB of storage...over 80X as much as I use after 10+ years

Give it time Wilt as PB goes through all the user accounts... I used PB for close to 15 years on a number of non photographic forums, have used 23% of a 2gb account and now every single one of these links is dead......

twoshadows wrote in post #18392311
Very much appreciate it.

The only caveat is that when you replace a photo it is removed from your forum gallery (if it was there), so you'll need to add it to your gallery again (edit metadata if not detected automatically).

Also, if a photo was in Best of gallery, drop me a PM after you have added it to gallery and I'll make it a Best of again.

I have done some tests and there can be a simple code solution in AMASS to all those forced ads replacing pb images. There are over 400,000 posts which have some photobucket images embedded.

if photobucket does not revert the decision and lift their embed ban and ad delivery system soon I'll do this

------------

- all photobucket images will get "banned" from being embedded: they will instead display a text and a link to the image. Something like:

frozenframe wrote in post #18391214
I've been using Flicker, and hope they don't follow suit. After seeing what Photobucket is doing, I deleted my account with them. I had very few photos there, as I've never liked how slow it is, and now adds flying everywhere.

I suspect others will see the disaster that is photobuckets experiment and run. That being said, while I really like Flicker and it's great for sharing kids photos with the family, it's not my photostorage device and I've got copies of everything safely stored away.

Pekka is the best! Things like this are why when AMASS was released I just started uploading my images directly. And also why i’m going to go pitch in a donation for hosting costs right now.

PB's site must be getting hammered right now since it took 5 tried to get an actual page instead of text. I've been using them for years for "throw away" images posted on forums that don't have their own hosting. Everything there is just a copy. It sucks that any posts I've made now show an ad.

Who's a good free host that allows linking? I have Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive but I used PB because it was totally separate and not connected to my work or real files.