Photobucket Rant - They SUCK

[Captain Obvious]

All my picture links are broken. All those threads with my pics in them are now pretty much useless because of Photobucket. They suck.

I've been using a free Photobucket account for years. All these years, I've uploaded pics to their site and then linked to them from other places (like this forum).

Well, guess what... They just made a changed their policy and removed the ability to link to pics from other locations. They call it "3rd party hosting", and you can no longer do it from a free account. In order to have that ability, you must upgrade to a higher level pay account. In fact, in order to have the ability to do "3rd party hosting", you have to upgrade to their "Plus 500" level account.

Now get this.... The cost for the pay account that will allow this linking is.......  $400 dollars per year!!!

So, I'm really sorry, but my pics are gone. If anyone has a specific thread that they're looking at and want the pics, I'll see what I can do about hosting them somewhere else, but I have so many that there's no way I can wholesale move everything at once. Sorry...

[Zup]

@240260280

[240260280]

ha ha ha you lost it CO. You are now a grumpy old web curmudgeon.   WELCOME TO THE CLUB.

 

The internet is dead

[240260280]

Bruce I can give you all the space you need.

Jim I'll ring you this weekend

[SteveJ]

My preferences are

1 http://photos.google.com

2. http://www.flckr.com

In that order.

[Patcon]

I am on a hunting forum that doesn't host pictures like Mike does here. I suspect all of their pictures are gone too. They were always carrying on about the Photobucket

@Captain Obvious

you could always down load them here and Mike will make sure they last

[Captain Obvious]

Many people believe that Photobucket is hitting up people who are approaching their storage limit. Well I'm nowhere near my storage limit. I'm at about 10% of my allotted capacity. I'm nowhere NEAR the limit. So that rumor isn't true. The whole thing stinks like questionable business practices.

After you have upload a picture, they present you with a number of link buttons to get the picture address in a couple different formats: One of these buttons called "Direct", gives you the URL address direct to the picture. This allowed you to use that link address to do what I did... Post it elsewhere. There's even another button called "Image", or something like that, which even puts the tags onto the address for forums that use that kind of nomenclature. You use that button if you don't want to put the IMG and /IMG tags onto the picture address yourself.

So why is this noteworthy?  BECAUSE THEY ACTUALLY PROVIDE EASY TO USE SHORT CUT BUTTONS TO ENCOURAGE YOU TO DIG YOURSELF INTO A HOLE THAT YOU NOW HAVE TO PAY FOR!!!

In other words... They have been providing these free easy to use features forever. You use these features and get yourself mired into a place that is very hard to get out of, and then AFTER you have dug your impossible to get out of hole, they bait and switch you and tell you it'll cost $400 per year to save your butt.

I've been looking at their ads for years. Photobucket gets paid by other companies for the right to have their ads pass through my eyeballs. And as incentive for me to look at their sponsors ads, they host my photos. That's the deal. I look at the ads, they host the pics. Then they decide they aren't getting enough from one end and hold my pics and years of built up threads as ransom? Almost as if they had this planned for a long time because they knew it would be impossible for people like me to recover from the change without paying.

Unfair business practices?

[Captain Obvious]

Patcon,

I know I could put the pics here on Mike's site, but many of what I have out there isn't specifically Z related. For example, the last pic I posted was my liquid level manometer that I was using for my motorcycle carbs. While it isn't Z car directly related, the topic came up, and you can even see a corner of my Z in the pic. I had that pic posted on a cycle forum and I would have to host it in multiple locations instead of just one and linking to it when appropriate.

It's reasons like that which make it desirable to have an independent picture host that I can link to.

Just not one that blindsides me with $400 per year!!!!

[Patcon]

Yeah the $400 blind side is outrageous. I have never used them because of all the negatives I had heard about them. I post fewer pictures but I am unwilling to put up with the frustration. $20 a year is more reasonable in my opinion. You can host whole websites for a lot less than $400 a year...

[Zed Head]

Probably some new business major hire saw an opportunity.

They seem to be getting some feedback.  They're thanking people for it.

https://twitter.com/photobucket?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^author

https://www.facebook.com/photobucket/

They've made the big-time news - http://www.pcmag.com/news/354711/photobucket-breaks-image-links-across-the-internet

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/30/photobucket_charging_400yr_3rdparty_pgs/

Edited July 1, 2017 by Zed Head

[grannyknot]

I have been bouncing around all my favorite forums today and seeing that damn photobucket image everywhere, tens of thousands of threads are virtually useless now, all that great work in the archives...  lynch them.

[EuroDat]

A new form of Ransomware?

Im surprised they don't have a bit coin method of payment.

I'm glad I have always uploaded photo's directly into the thread.

Edited July 2, 2017 by EuroDat