What's up with Photobucket

[racerman_27410]

one more to make sure i've got it down....

[Pat Conlon]

Damn, that's still a fine looking machine Frank....How is Brutus running?

How many miles do you have on the 1350?

[racerman_27410]

Damn, that's still a fine looking machine Frank....How is Brutus running?

How many miles do you have on the 1350?

Bike is running fine.... it has gotten stronger and a little quicker revving over the 9500 miles i have on the engine. On days when i'm not riding good or dont feel 100% i am sorry i went with the light crank cause Brutus dont give a damn how you feel ... when you crack the throttle you had better be ready..... but most times i am really happy i did it because it provides some seriously IMMEDIATE KOOKALOO! and the sounds it makes reminds me of a small block chevy that rips revs like a formula one car.....it is very entertaining to say the least!.

To be honest i got a lot more attention from the police with the bike dressed in factory colors..... i can still go back to this look if i ever get nostalgic...

[ribbert]

It appears Photobuckets "ransom" attempt didn't go unoticed. This article is by a business/finance writer from a leading news service (News.com.au)

Those here that got screwed by them might like to read it is unlikely to go well for them.

A POPULAR website used by sellers on auction sites like Amazon, Etsy, eBay and Gumtree is facing a growing backlash for effectively demanding a "ransom" from its members.
Photobucket, a US-based image and video-hosting website founded in 2003, quietly changed its policy late last month to prevent users from hosting their content on third-party websites unless they pay a $US400 ($526) annual fee.
Members who used the previously free service to store their content for use on auction sites, blogs and internet forums have discovered their images replaced with a message asking them to "update your account".
No warning was given, but the company posted a brief blog post on June 26 announcing an "update to our terms of service", with the change buried towards the end of the article.
The move means more than a decade worth of images hosted all over the internet have suddenly turned into broken links unless members sign up for one of Photobucket's "competitive subscription plans"........

Twitter user Spammals described it as "how to destroy a business overnight". "Even if you revert the change it's too late," they wrote. "The damage is now done and it grows worse every second."
Many likened it to recent ransomware attacks which lock victims out of their own computer systems until they pay up. "Anyone else surprised Photobucket isn't offering Bitcoin as the only method of payment?" asked Twitter user McMike.
User Superfuture wrote: "We now have 3.2 million forum posts from 2003 littered with your ransom images. This has to be illegal. Hello all class action lawyers."
Stefan Bosman tweeted: "Thank you for all the good years I've had with your product. Now deleted my account due to the $400 blackmail. Good way to go out of business."
Photobucket, which claims to have more than 100 million members and 15 billion hosted images, has not responded to the growing backlash save for a few tweets.
"Thank you for all of the recent feedback and questions," the company tweeted on Sunday. "We are trying our best to respond quickly and thank you for your patience ." A day earlier, it tweeted: "Want to know more about 3rd party hosting? Check out our FAQs."
Australian Glen Stephens, owner of Stampboards.com, the world's largest stamp collecting bulletin board with more than five million posts going back over a decade, said he and members on five continents had spent "hundreds of hours" this week "rescuing what we can", rehosting images on stable platforms like Imgur.com before Photobucket goes "belly up".
"It is clearly a 'WannaCry' style gangster level ransom demand for millions [in] cash before they fold forever," he told news.com.au in an email.
"'Pay us $A525 right now upfront, or no-one will ever see your images again.' Photobucket are number 663 busiest website in the US based on Alexa rankings and Imgur who do the same free photo hosting are 11, so it is not as if Photobucket had a monopoly!"
UK-based vintage store Retro 2 Go, which sells goods on eBay, was one of those affected. "I have quite a bit of editing to do," the store's owner told the BBC. "A bit of notice would not have been unreasonable to expect. I have deleted my accounts and would not use [Photobucket] again."
On Reddit, one user wrote that while Photobucket was "absolutely entitled to change their business model whenever they feel like it", the way the company handled it would "go down as one of the great customer-service f***-ups in internet history".
"Folks, you're witnessing the death of an internet business," another user wrote. "This is the kind of screw up a company never really recovers from."
Another wrote that "you can't even begin to imagine what this will mean to internet forums and blogs". "Older internet users remember what a dumpster fire the internet was when Angelfire, Geocities, and Tripod stopped offering free hosting," they wrote.
"Broken links everywhere and it was the exact same cause, they started out to give everyone free hosting, but they reached critical mass as more people signed up for the free than the paid."
In a blog post, marketing firm Aqueous Digital described it as a "case study on how not to do it". "Not only did they dump this on their users with zero notice but they are compounding the issue with their communications, or lack of them," the company wrote.
"From a commercial point of view, there must have been a growing imperative to step away from a model primarily reliant on advertising. With a growth in customer numbers and an increase in bandwidth usage, their cost base must have been spiralling. It's a byproduct of their success.
"The solution however surely was not what they have come up with? Firstly, why make the change with no notice? Why simply change overnight and then dump on your customers? Secondly, how on earth did they arrive at their pricing point? When so many people use their service specifically for third-party hosting and nothing else, why provide this service only at the highest price point you have?"
Photobucket was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007, but in 2009 was sold by Fox parent company News Corp, publisher of news.com.au, to Seattle-based mobile start-up Ontela.
frank.chung@news.com.au

[PaulG]

Garrrrgghhhh!!! I've been Photobucketed!  It's like The Blob! Time to migrate to Flikr or whatever. I've got all night.... Maybe time for a new avatar too.

Oh yeah - once we transfer pics to another host, does anyone know how or if we can re-link our photos to old posts?

[Stoney]

I have been using imgur hassle free (mostly) for a few years, I have 2200 images on there apparentely.
ingur was orioginally designed to host images for reddit, then they added forums and effectively became a direct competitor to reddit, so reddit recently added their own image server called 'redd' (which i haven't used).
one thing with imgur, it is designed to be a hosting sevice for forums, if nobody looks at the picture for ages then imgur will delete it to free up space, they say it may be after days, however in reality i have images from years ago that are still there with zero views as I never posted them.
I tend to use an ipad for everything but work, it has an ipad app ... plus you can use albums and group images and have the same image in multiple albums..

heres me pups .. https://imgur.com/gallery/zCJVk

[PaulG]

I've transferred some pics to Flickr and have been able to add the travel map in the signature section.  But I can't seem to copy a GIF for my profile pic.  I use the BBCode but it just dissappears when I try to save my profile. Does Flickr allow this?  Or is it only pics.  Their help "page" seems a bit convoluted.

[FJ1100mjk]

I've transferred some pics to Flickr and have been able to add the travel map in the signature section.

You need to have more western states colored. Yep.

[racerrad8]

http://www.denverpost.com/2017/07/16/photobucket-fee-hike/

I have spoken to my software person today. He was unaware of the change PB had implemented.

He is going to see if there is some sort of fix available for use to get the photos back up and online.

If not, it will be up to each user to update their photos to a different hosting company and re-post them. If someone want to change to a new company, you will need to get with a member of the moderation so they can unlock your post(s) for editing the photos.

Also, for all of the Imgur users, I found this today as well. It talks about using them as a 3rd party host and how it is not allowed...
https://imgur.com/tos

Stuff not to do
If someone else might own the copyright to it, don't upload it. Don't upload gore, "hate speech" (i.e. demeaning race, gender, age, religious or sexual orientation, etc.), or material that is threatening, harassing, defamatory, or that encourages violence or crime. Don't upload illegal content such as child porn or nonconsensual ("revenge") porn. Don't hotlink to adult content or to file-sharing, gambling, torrent, warez, or Imgur rip-off sites. Don't impersonate someone else. Also, don't use Imgur to host image libraries you link to from elsewhere, content for your website, advertising, avatars, or anything else that turns us into your content delivery network. If you do – and we will be the judge – or if you do anything illegal, in addition to any other legal rights we may have, we will ban you along with the site you're hotlinking from, delete all your images, report you to the authorities if necessary, and prevent you from viewing any images hosted on Imgur.com. We mean it.
Hopefully good news to follow...

Randy - RPM

[Pat Conlon]

FYI, here is a tip I copied from the Miata Net Forum:

For anyone unaware, you can right-click on a dud picture and copy the link, paste it into a new browser tab and that'll take you to the picture on PB. If the borked version still appears, <Ctrl>+<F5> forces it to refresh and you'll see the pic.

[racerrad8]

Testing.



Not sure what's going on, I'm with photobucket and still seems to be working for me.

Not anymore...

Randy - RPM

[racerrad8]

FYI, here is a tip I copied from the Miata Net Forum:

For anyone unaware, you can right-click on a dud picture and copy the link, paste it into a new browser tab and that'll take you to the picture on PB. If the borked version still appears, <Ctrl>+<F5> forces it to refresh and you'll see the pic.

That does take you to PB to see the photo, but I just clicked on Bones photo. Before it loaded three pop up adds covered the screen and it took quite some time to load.

Hopefully there is some wort of work around on the horizon...

Randy - RPM

[Bones]

I've been fiddling around with photobucket trying to download the pictures from there to Flickr, Not having any luck for some reason, must've broken something somewhere.

[PaulG]

I've been fiddling around with photobucket trying to download the pictures from there to Flickr, Not having any luck for some reason, must've broken something somewhere.

The process I used was :

1.  Download from photobucket to your hard drive using their instructions. It stores them in a zip file.

2.  Unzip the file.

3.  Upload the pics to Flickr.

The downloading can take quite a while depending on how many pics you select and your internet speed. My library was a few hundred pics so I did it in three batches.  I've only uploaded about 30 to Flickr for my most recent posts.

Hope that helps

[X-Ray]

^^^^^ Exactly what I have done. Its too hard to go back through every post over the years to relink photos, such a shame because the info contained is still relevant.  Might get around to slowly trying to do it though.