We were discussing Photobucket on another forum and some guys there said they weren't having any issues like this with their free account. I downloaded a pic to my Photobucket page just now.



Lets see how long it stays up.

I already lost a lot of my pictures to Yahoo when they did similar years ago.  Even at that time I could not remember which images I had where.

I don't believe it is possible for me to go back and redo even if I had the time. 

That is the reason I will not put anything on the cloud today.  Extortion or blackmail by the internet providers who now have our content.

I have used Facebook recently successfully but I don't even know if those links still work or will keep working in the future. 

AZGreg, some PB servers are still serving images. Most are not, and replace your image with an ad that redirects to their new PB500 plan. Change to terms of service are real.

Only hotlinking is affected. That has been disallowed without subscription to their $400 year plan.  Image storage appears to still be available at a much lower price.

The company, from reports, seems to be in disarray right now.  Not sure what is going on, but our recommendation is to get out of PB while you can.

Glenn - we are exploring allowing limited size photo uploads - have to see what John and Don have to say about that.

What is your opinion?

hpinson, all my stuff has been saved and removed from pb except for a few images like the one above. I have all my images on a portable hard drive at home. I'm looking at having my own website though for photo hosting.

Nice. That's what I do too.  There's cost, but at least you know it won't disappear.

Quote from: azgreg on July 06, 2017, 11:55:47 AM
hpinson, all my stuff has been saved and removed from pb except for a few images like the one above. I have all my images on a portable hard drive at home. I'm looking at having my own website though for photo hosting.

I can understand people wanting to delete their PB accounts, as this was such a bush league move.  They could have at least grandfathered in old photos.

But as I pointed out in my previous post (http://countryplans.com/smf/index.php?topic=14736.msg192352#msg192352) the images are still accessible by a right click.  So ideally, if people have some good stuff up there that would help out other owner-builders, it would be great to leave the photos on PB (unless the old posts are going to be edited to point to a new source).  Will still be lousy browsing old threads, but at least the information won't be lost.

Good point.

I'm personally hacked off with them for springing this on the world with out any warning, and breaking so many content rich forums... to the point where I would not want to do business with them. The douchebaggary is great here.

But what you describe works well.

Hosting here with small images could be a plan, but I'm afraid it might be a bit more complicated than most would want to deal with.

Possibly we could link an image resizer they could get onto using.... or maybe find some other easy way.

Images don't have to be any larger than 700 or 800 pixels in either width or height and can be limited to under 200 KB and still display fine on most monitors. That's my opinion. It is the resizing that becomes the issue as the SMF software will not resize, though it can be set to limit upload file size and the image dimensions. By limit I mean the software will refuse the upload.

Info gleaned from another forum... "If you were a Plus Account subscriber in good standing as of June 1, 2017,
you will continue to have all the privileges you have enjoyed including 3rd Party Hosting until December 31, 2018 as long as you maintain your subscription."

Glenn and Don, I checked our hosting plan.  We have 3TB monthly transfer - anything over that kicks us to the next level plan which is a no-no cost-wise for John.  Unfortunately the host does not charge per-gigabyte overage - you just bump up to the next level of plan cost. We average around a terabyte a month transfer over the last few years, down a bit lately. Our disk size is 50GB.

Seems to me it would be easy to wipe out the 50GB disc in a short period of time, but I'm not sure about small images.  I'm a data hog and have 160GB on my cell phone I have to be careful with.   

I never paid much attention to images in forums before.  I don't frequent a lot of them, but I do visit another build-it-yourself forum, but this one is about speaker cabinets, not cabins.  I noticed there that almost all the images are from postimages.org. 

After the PB fiasco, I would be hesitant to rely on any third party long term, but this outfit seems like it is a good fit for forum images.  Their terms of conditions (http://postimages.org/terms) specifically allows it.

Here is the interesting thing:  in its terms, it suggests

QuotePlease keep the images embedded into third-party websites wrapped in links back to the corresponding HTML pages at our site when possible. The outgoing link should lead the user directly to our web page without any interstitial pages or interruptions. This allows your users to get access to the full-resolution images, and also helps us pay our bills.

And it seems that's what everyone does at that forum (although I don't think it is a rule).  I can't give a direct link to the forum other than  this: http://greenboy.us/forum/ which only shows the welcome forum (you have to join to see the real content), but here is a link to a PDF of one of the pages.  As you can see, on this PDF (generated from Chrome so it saves the hyperlinks -- go ahead and click on the picture), the image is only a thumbnail, but you can click on it to get the full image.  Just click on the "share" button and select "thumbnail for forums"

Here it is in action (same picture - not mine - as in the PDF):



This significantly cuts down the bandwidth postimage.org needs to use, lets users see the (not too small) thumbnail, and has a link to the fulls size image.

I know you said at this point you don't want to recommend a service, but if you were to, this seems like the way to go.

That would work well. I don't think we would want to require it - i.e. the bandwidth on our end for displaying linked images is adequate.

An interesting observation. If you use a Chrome browser, right click on one of those PB ransom images and select "search Google for image" the results list comes up noting "About 25,270,000,000 results (1.29 seconds)"
  That's a lot of webpages with missing images.  Blogs, personal sites, forums, review sites, food & recipe sitesyou name it and it's there.

My account finally quit...  now to go recover... ugh. 
I never did a build thread, but I guess I'll start with my cottage since its recent and work back.

Damn...  I thought I could right-click and have it bring me to the image, save it locally, upload to new site, and fix the link.  When I go to photobucket directly, I still see that same "3rd party hosting" error.  There's no way to know what image you had posted where.  Am I missing something?

Here are the steps I did to relink my images to a new site.

1) Create an imgcur account. Create a public folder called forum.
2) Go to your build thread.
3) Locate the first post with bad image, right-click the image and select "Open in new tab".
4) The image may not even show, ignore that and click the "Download" link under OPTIONS.
6) Save the image to a new folder somewhere, maybe give it some meaning so you can recognize it later.
7) Go to your imgcur account, click the "Add Image" button.  Once uploaded, select the new image and on the right-hand side copy the "BBCode (Forums)" link using the "Copy" button.
Go back to your post, select "Modify" and replace the photobucket address with the one from imgcur (should be in your clipboard).

(Trying to make this as user friendly as possible)

Thanks Adam.

Quote from: Adam Roby on July 09, 2017, 09:13:11 PM
Here are the steps I did to relink my images to a new site.

1) Create an imgcur account. Create a public folder called forum
....

By imgcur do you mean imgur?  If so, UK4x4 in this post (on page 1): http://countryplans.com/smf/index.php?topic=14736.msg192342#msg192342 quoted their terms of service that expressly using it for putting images on 3rd party websites.  They apparently haven't blanket enforced it the way photobucket did, but if one is going to go to the work of changing to a new provider, imgur may not be the way to go.

It is worrysome. Some big sites like Reddit rely on Imgur as image host. My own observation is that, at least to date, it is very selectively enforced.  That could always change.

Imgur was created for reddit. Strange the terms would prohibit 3rd party hosting now.

Well a few things have been discussed that should be shared:

1. We are not able to directly host images at this time at the Countryplans.com forum.  We don't have the financial resources to support the disk space and bandwidth.

2. For the time being we will not seek donations to help support the forum.  It's a is a good idea, but John is currently not in a position to setup a non-profit infrastructure to accept donations, and wishes to keep the site completely free.

3. We won't recommend a particular image hosting service. In interest of spreading risk - choose an image hosting service that works for you. We hope the community will do their best to help if you have problems posting images using that service.

This is a good summary of where we are now. Several people have found a service that for now, at least, can host and serve 3rd party images to forum postings.