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Photobucket to stop allowing direct linking unless you pay.


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I'm guessing those links would indicate a drop off in their advertising revenue if traffic goes hand in hand with revenue. This latest abomination possibly a panic move to get out of jail & collect $200.00 whilst going past Go all in one hit. Hope it doesn't work.

Steve.

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10 hours ago, Wm Blecky said:

...

 Did anyone receive advance warning of this or was it pretty much just just woke up one morning and no pictures?

I was in the middle of posting up-date modelling photos to modelling forums, took a break of about 2 mins to sort the next bunch when it happened. Just checked a previously put photo and found the ransom note. Checked the other photos - all the same, then checked old photos, just the same.

No warning email till about a week after the event.

 

1 hour ago, Ed Russell said:

These links have a graph showing traffic on Botophucket.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/photobucket.com

http://www.rank2traffic.com/photobucket.com

 

Those graphs cover to end of May [1st one] and to beginning of June [2nd one]

I wonder how they read when they include all of June, July and August

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22 minutes ago, Steve_farrier said:

@Mike is it worth considering a forum software that hosts its own photos to future proof? I'd not be suprised if all platforms start to charge and follow PB example

 

All forum software can host images. It's the cost of a server that can store it all which is why some forums like BM opt to not allow uploading images (especially since a modelling forum will be image-heavy by nature). Imagine how many pics are posted per day here, then consider that these images all pop up in google searches which takes up bandwidth.

 

Though most forums are the labor of love of their respective admins, it's unreasonable for them to have to foot the bill for all of this so that everyone else enjoys it for free. And contrary, having a paid site will make it much less attractive. It's not an easy trade-off.

 

 

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I fully appreciate that :-) 

(I used to run a paid for forum so appreciate it more than most) 

although cost could simply be sold by selling a couple of banner adverts at the top of the page. 

 

im not suggesting it be done, more of a "what if" all free hosting sites stop or the free ones become so glitchy it spoils forum usage anyway:-) 

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It's a bit of a problem for us, as the site isn't run for profit, and we're not going to change that anytime soon.  All the existing donations do is help fund the server and related domain costs for that explicit reason.  As there are so many other photo hosts still out there, we're not looking to compete with free or nearly free services when we have no real way of doing so, and zero experience in the field.  It's so far outside our comfort zone that it's a total turn-off.  We are modellers first and foremost.  Anything I know about server management has been picked up along the way, and is just as easily forgotten with my cotton-wool brain :unsure:

 

If all the online photo-hosts had suddenly gone out of business or priced themselves out of the market, we would have considered it, but as it's just one... who just happened to have been the largest and most frequently used. :shrug: As crappy as that is for the members, it's tough luck on us all, and I include myself and the rest of the team in that, as we've also lost thousands of possible resources for when we come to build our next models.  :poop:

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Just looked at this - http://www.rank2traffic.com/photobucket.com and if I understand it correctly it appears that the traffic on PB has been falling steadily for the past 5 years from 120 million sessions/month to 35million so maybe their income from advertising has fallen to reflect this and they felt the need to do something about it. With people leaving because of the increased charge or leaving things as they were it looks as if PB is headed for the rocks so we might have been faced with same problem in the near future. At least this way it has happened gradually and we had a warning instead of the lights suddenly being switched off.

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Downloaded all my images from PB,Closed account,gave fairly fruity reply to why I was leaving,headed over to Imageshack,Introductory half price offer (about £15.00)for a year,which allows linking\embedding images to third party websites.

Job done.

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6 hours ago, John R said:

Just looked at this - http://www.rank2traffic.com/photobucket.com and if I understand it correctly it appears that the traffic on PB has been falling steadily for the past 5 years from 120 million sessions/month to 35million so maybe their income from advertising has fallen to reflect this and they felt the need to do something about it. With people leaving because of the increased charge or leaving things as they were it looks as if PB is headed for the rocks so we might have been faced with same problem in the near future. At least this way it has happened gradually and we had a warning instead of the lights suddenly being switched off.

And it appears Flickr has grown by the same amount/rate over same period...guess where their customers went?

 

just sayin...

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1 minute ago, Greenshirt said:

And it appears Flickr has grown by the same amount/rate over same period...guess where their customers went?

 

just sayin...

Let's just hope Flickr don't feel the need to pull a similar stunt...

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We live in hope that they don't, but remember the watchword... back it all up!  Then you can leave your work there to clutter up their servers ;)

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Other sites are probably watching this unfold and waiting to see how it pans out, me I think PB is on the way out, they've just priced themselves out of the market in one quick click hoping people would just pay up.

Now the others sites are just waiting to see what they can charge that we will accept as resonable. PB did not think this through at all, or did they, next installment the price has dropped 90% and you can carry on as before, pity those who paid the full non refundable ransome first time around.

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On 30/06/2017 at 10:24 PM, jrlx said:

This is just an experiment to see if it works.

 

I have an Office 360 subscription, which includes 1 TByte of cloud space in OneDrive. I've just uploaded a picture of some recent modelling work. Then right-clicked on it in OneDrive and chose the "Embed" option. This produces an HTML string for direct access to the picture. The string was copied and here I chose "Insert other media", on the lower right hand corner of the editor, then "Insert image from URL" and pasted the HTML string to the dialogue window.

 

Voilà!
y4meVw0zAy8FQzD_lMKJp7v1-pt5HOwEQIlaspPX

 

This could work with other storage services, possibly.

 

If any of you is unable to see the picture, please let me know.

 

I'm now considering moving my pictures to One Drive and slowly update the links in my previous posts.

 

Cheers

 

Jaime

 

 

 

Great spot. I shall give this a go this evening..

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On ‎11‎/‎7‎/‎2017 at 7:28 PM, Tomtom said:

 

 The yanks would sue a fly for landing in there soup given half a chance.

Here, here!!!

 

 

I have also removed all pictures and closed my PB account.

Edited by Shalako
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15 minutes ago, Shalako said:

I have also removed all pictures and closed my PB account.

 

That's probably just what they want all the free users to do, so that there's more room for paying clients.  I'm leaving my stuff where it is.

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On 21 July 2017 at 12:43, johnny jaguar and the jets said:

A great shame to lose all these interesting pictures and useful references.

 

 

True, was browsing some dog and car forums, (I have other hobbies) and loads of missing pictures there too - lost information and references which is frustrating...

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You are meant to be able to download your albums -  what happens is you request a download and you get emailed (eventually) a link to download a zip file of your images that will expire after 24hrs. People had reported that it was not working and at the moment I get it to do anything. I have all my build photos backed-up on my PC but not 200 misc photos mainly of the workbench. 

So as I knew it was possible to look at the individual photos if were doing from the PB website I decided to spoof the cookie information and download the files myself. The following is rather technical and requires access to a linux device or shell emulator such Cygwin or Bash on Windows 10, so I suspect it will be of limited use to many. There may be a native Windows way of doing it using a windows version of CURL.

1. Go to the album you wish to download. Select all the images (fussy as the Select All doesn't appear till you have selected one)
2. Get Links and paste the forum links (...) into a text editor
3. Use Find&Replace to delete all the tags. Save it somewhere your Linux shell can access
4. use dos2unix on the text file to change the line endings
5. Run the following script which will download the files while pretending the request came from a PB session:

while read f ; do curl -X GET -e "$f.html" -O $f ; done < pathtofileofimages
Edited by JamesP
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