Wondering....

edit: nope still good here

To highlight just how ridiculous the $400/year is, you can get your own domain and web hosting for ~$8/month.

quote:

Originally posted by bobtheelf:
To highlight just how ridiculous the $400/year is, you can get your own domain and web hosting for ~$8/month.

My Flickr® account is $50 a year, I think.

flashguy

What an advertising nightmare. Seems they didn't think of the thousands (millions???) of forums in the world that were suddenly going to break and instead of showing a picture it is the annoying grey and black update your account BS, which will now be associated as a royal screw up to your customers.

DIY how to threads, sticky threads with good info - all with pictures on how to do something.

Finally got all my photos (that I want to keep) off photobucket. What a disaster that site is.

My avatar took a dump last week and that's how I noticed it. They wanted like $400 to upgrade my account. That gave me a good laugh.

I've probably had my Photobuket account for 15 years.

They can eat shit. They've been a joke for years now. Final straw.

Photobucket says photo-f**k-it, starts off-site image shakedown

Photobucket is cracking down on people embedding on third-party websites images it hosts, until now, for free.

The photo-slinging internet elder now says that anyone who wants to use its service to display photos it hosts on other pages – such as signature banners in forum posts – will now need to open up their wallets and plop down $399.99 a year for a subscription plan.

The new policy will be particularly annoying to longtime users who have relied on Photobucket's 14-year-old service to host the images they use to place images on forums or in blog posts.

Cheaper plans, including the free account option, will no longer have an option to allow third-party hosting.

The alert netizens now get from Photobucket for inlining images on third-party sites
The change of heart was quietly introduced by Photobucket earlier this week as an update to its terms of service.

On the one hand, it's reasonable for Photobucket to ask for some help in footing its bandwidth bills for serving up images for folks on other websites; on the other hand, it will break a lot of graphics posted on the 'net and inlined in forums and blogs.

"Photobucket defines 3rd-party hosting as the action of embedding an image or photo onto another website," the updated T&Cs read.

"For example, using the <img> tag to embed or display a JPEG image from your Photobucket account on another website such as a forum, Etsy, eBay auction listings, a blog, etc, is definitively 3rd-party hosting."

Not surprisingly, the new rules went over with users about as well as a rattlesnake in a pinata.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/..._400yr_3rdparty_pgs/

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Photobucket Breaks Image Links Across the Internet

Embedding images on a website or in a forum post is a very common practice, with those images usually living on one of the many well-known image hosting websites. One such host is Photobucket, but a recent change to its subscription tiers means many millions of images across the Internet are no longer going to load outside of Photobucket's own site.

The key feature of a Photobucket account we're talking about here is called "3rd Party Hosting." It allows you to embed images from Photobucket in another location on the Internet, e.g. in a forum post or on a website.

As Norvic Philatelics discovered, Photobucket changed its terms and conditions and removed the 3rd Party Hosting feature from the lower subscription tiers. If you want to continue using that feature then a Photobucket Plus 500 subscription is required. It costs $39.99 per month or $399 per year.

Not only is that very expensive, it means existing Photobucket accounts on lower subscriptions tiers will have any embedded images they've created in the past cease to work. Considering Photobucket has been around since 2003 and hosts over 10 billion images, that's potentially millions of embedded images across the Internet being broken thanks to a policy change. Here's just one example of how this change impacts a forum thread.

The worst part of this debacle, according to Ghacks.net, is the fact Photobucket users were apparently given no warning of the change. The subscription features simply changed, and images stopped loading without explanation.

There's hope this is a mistake, or that Photobucket's management will realize the scale of the problem they have created with this change. But if that doesn't happen, expect to see that Photobucket broken link image above many times in the coming months.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/354...-across-the-internet

Already affecting some threads in Classifieds:

https://sigforum.com/eve/forums...0601935/m/5400017624

And the cigar thread now looks very sad...

Just tried the Amazon Prime Photo hosting. Works like a charm!
Tony.

Their FB page is full of love like this:

quote:

Eat a bag of dicks, Photobucket. Your site has been going downhill for a few years now, to the point where the interface has been near unusable even with ad blockers. And now you want us to pay a premium for this garbage user experience? It amounts to extortion and reeks of desperation. Buh-bye, I'm out.
LikeShow more reactions · Reply · 16 · July 1 at 8:18pm

I know this sucks for everybody, but I think Photobucket had to do this (or at least something like this) I don't think they're being greedy. I think they are desperate. The cost of bandwidth and storage is probably huge for them. I'll bet with the advent of ad blockers, their ad revenue has been going down, which is probably their main revenue stream.

I've been seeing this on several websites, lately, where they ask you to turn off your ad blocker, or to subscribe. I think the days of the free internet are coming to an end. We as users are going to have one of two choices: deal with ads or pay a fee.

quote:

Originally posted by benny6:
Just tried the Amazon Prime Photo hosting. Works like a charm!
Tony.

Well, the free 3rd party hosting party may be coming to an end. I might not mind a few bucks a month for PB hosting but their new plan is extortion and the free market will take care of it if they don't amend their tier structure.

Benny6. I had hoped for using amazon but as yet. SF doesn't like HTTPS posting. Any tips/tutorial you could share would be appreciated. Thanks

quote:

Originally posted by Storm:
I know this sucks for everybody, but I think Photobucket had to do this (or at least something like this) I don't think they're being greedy. I think they are desperate. The cost of bandwidth and storage is probably huge for them. I'll bet with the advent of ad blockers, their ad revenue has been going down, which is probably their main revenue stream.

I've been seeing this on several websites, lately, where they ask you to turn off your ad blocker, or to subscribe. I think the days of the free internet are coming to an end. We as users are going to have one of two choices: deal with ads or pay a fee.

I'm happy to pay a reasonable fee for someone's service. $400/year is not reasonable. In addition, they could have used a tiered system. $5/month for a guy like me who posts a few cigar and dog pictures now and then...significantly more for those who are obviously using the site for their business needs.

They really dicked the dog on this one.

quote:

Originally posted by Georgeair:
Their FB page is full of love like this:

quote:

Eat a bag of dicks, Photobucket. Your site has been going downhill for a few years now, to the point where the interface has been near unusable even with ad blockers. And now you want us to pay a premium for this garbage user experience? It amounts to extortion and reeks of desperation. Buh-bye, I'm out.
LikeShow more reactions · Reply · 16 · July 1 at 8:18pm

On their page:
⚠️ Thank you for all of the recent feedback and questions. We are trying our best to respond quickly and thank you for your patience

Damage control much?

Not surprisingly, their site seems to be crushed right now. No doubt due to virtually every user rushing to log on, download pics they need for places they've relied on them, want to save or otherwise just need to make sure they have copies of.

Thanks for the Amazon tip - hopefully it will work with sites like this.....

I was caught unawares the other day as well, and hadn't noticed this thread until Orguss pointed it out to me (and here I was thinking all Orguss did was post up pretty avatars. Hmmph...).

I tried to use postimage.org to reset my avatar, but it no worky. Anyone have a free alternative that I can use to get my avatar back up? I'm kinda slowish on some of these techniques, but I get there eventually if pointed the correct direction.

I switched to imgur after photofuckit plucked my last nerve. It's been great for over a year now.

quote:

Originally posted by SigSentry:

quote:

Originally posted by benny6:
Just tried the Amazon Prime Photo hosting. Works like a charm!
Tony.

Well, the free 3rd party hosting party may be coming to an end. I might not mind a few bucks a month for PB hosting but their new plan is extortion and the free market will take care of it if they don't amend their tier structure.

Benny6. I had hoped for using amazon but as yet. SF doesn't like HTTPS posting. Any tips/tutorial you could share would be appreciated. Thanks

Hmm, haven't tried to post a pic on SF, but I did on another forum. Let me try here the same way I did there...



For Mac, after you upload the picture to Amazon Prime, click on the photo to view the full screen version. Right click the image and click "Copy Image Address".

When you post on the forum, click the "Insert Image" icon and paste the image address into the "Image URL" text box and click "ok". When you submit your post, it will show up like my picture.

For Windows, do the same thing except instead of clicking "Copy Image Address", right-click and select "Properties". When the text box pops up it will list the address "Address (URL)". Copy the address and paste it to the "Image URL" text box and submit your post.

Clear as mud?

Tony.

Jim, which of the image copy options do you choose to post your avatar?

There was one that showed up and the sigforum automated machine thingy liked, but then it doesn't show up on the forum...

ETA: Fixed it! Yeah, everyone needs a little wifebeater Samuel L. Jackson in their lives.

quote:

Originally posted by bobtheelf:
To highlight just how ridiculous the $400/year is, you can get your own domain and web hosting for ~$8/month.

Yep. And with a $100/year Amazon prime membership you get their photo hosting, plus free 2-day shipping on about a million items, prime music, prime video, kindle books, etc...

$400/year for just photo hosting is ridiculous. If Photobucket was looking for a quick fix to their bandwidth problems I bet they just solved it.