Large Scale Central

PhotoBucket has devastated research

General Discussion
#1

I went researching a thread I made note of for future modeling and found every picture was missing with the PhotoBucket ‘screw you’ graphic. After finding that on just one thread here on this forum, I wonder how many other fora have had the same level of devastation invoked on them by PhotoBucket?

Too bad the forum operators can’t ban together and pressure them to allow the pics to be displayed that were already there, but no new ones. Easily done by a file date analysis by the PhotoBucket software.

#2

I agree, it’s pretty bad, and as I remember not much or any notice was given. The notice made it really irritating, but the bottom line, suddenly charging and charging a lot for something that was free is what killed things.

If people were charged $20 a year or something nominal, it probably would have been palatable.

Even moving the pictures to another host was not the solution, as the problem is the addresses of pictures were what were in the forums.

Long ago, when being burned by things turning from free to pay, I realized that “free” has to have a very strong business case to survive, i.e. they have to make money some way!

Greg

#3

Remember when HULU was free?

#4

Or MTV had no ads?

#5

Or MTV actually played music videos.

Yes the whole PhotoBuket thing has really messed up a lot of sites. I know that they want to make money, but shooting almost every site that uses photos in the foot, isn’t going to endear them to anyone. I was searching for something the other night, and the how to article was probably very helpful, but the background wallpaper of the site was a collage of the PhotoBucket ‘screw you’ graphic, as was every picture in the thread. So now that thread is useless, as are countless others.

#6

All of my build threads were trashed…

#7

You do know you can go to photobucket, get the pictures back, put them somewhere safe and then redo the thread… a pain in the butt but you can copy your old posts, or better yet, edit them and update the picture link.

Greg

#8

Travis Dague said:

All of my build threads were trashed…

.

#9

Ima Bad Rooster said:

You do know you can go to photobucket, get the pictures back, put them somewhere safe and then redo the thread… a pain in the butt but you can copy your old posts, or better yet, edit them and update the picture link.

Greg

Didn’t Barbra Striesand do a song called Contradiction

#10

I took Travis’ comment to mean that there are no visible pictures in his build threads.

I don’t know if you can edit really old threads, but I’m sure that if it was a problem, Bob could make it happen.

Greg

#11

Yes it is very bad, has messed up photos on lots of other forums I visit. Luckily, I only used photobucket for a very short while.

#12

Well, it depends on the site if one can edit old threads (posts). It seams here on LSC, older threads can be edited, and its the same on another site I frequent. But I know the old LSOL had a time frame of a few hours, and after that posts were uneditable. But the amount of time and effort that would be involved in repairing old threads would be such that most folks would not bother.

#13

It might not be as bad as you think David, if the file names are kept the same, you could edit pretty quickly with pasting the “root url” and leaving the picture name… (editing the source of the post).

Not simple, but not impossible, and can be somewhat automated.

(I have done this when I have re-organized some directories on my site.)

Greg

#14

True, but one would have to find the original source photos, or copy them off Photobucket if you can still get to them, and then host them somewhere else. And then there is always going to be that thread that was written so long ago, that it the writer forgot about it, so it never gets fixed.

All of this could have been avoided if Photobucket had implemented a better plan.

#15

Yes, the pictures are not gone from photobucket, but just not available for 3rd party hosting unless you pay.

Really all of these steps have been gone over, I’m just responding to Travis that he could fix the build thread if he wanted.

Clearly Travis did not forget about it…

Greg

#16

Maynard, they implemented the plan perfectly. Get thousands of folks hooked on a ‘FREE’ service, then cut off their access for ransom. PhotoBucket is not the first outfit to use that business model. That allows them to generate a large influx of cash with out any additional stock offering, and make the bottom line look real good for the current investors. Or why I NEVER subscribe to anything that is free and place any thing I care about in that location. All my pics are hosted on my web space at Godaddy.

#17

Bob, yes, I understand. But I also understand that many folks, after they get burned, are going to go elsewhere. Once people get a sour taste in their mouths, they tend to go elsewhere, and take their friends with them.

#18

Steve Featherkile said:

Remember when HULU was free?

She charges now?

#19

Yes, the Photobucket thing has definitely wreaked havoc with virtually every forum of any kind.

After having two “free” photo hosting services go belly up, I determined that I would never again rely on such a service.

#20

Ya’all starting to feel my pain when the chimps at MLS blew up our photo storage. Photobuckets hijacking of third party access is similar to when those of us who woke up and found all of our threads dead from lack of photos.

I can tell you from personal experience the idea of reloading and re-editing old post is exhaustive at best, impossible at worst. I only did it to a few important threads, and even then it wasn’t complete. Some sites simply do not allow editing of old posts after a certain time span so those sites posts had to be abandoned. I suppose the best solution is to create your own personal website, but I haven’t got the time or energy anymore like I did 10-15 years ago to do so.