Photo bucket....what is this??

[Lucky13]

That's where the siggy is, on photobucket....
I'll check as soon as my scan is done on the laptop....

 

[Wurger]

OK. Now we are on the right path.

If it is on the pb, no wonder we can see the shot instead of your siggy. It means that it is the stinki hosting site issue.

Do you know how to find the URL of the siggy here using your laptop or you need my help?

 

[Robert Porter]

Guys this is what I posted about earlier. PhotoBucket has pissed off a huge number of people with this tactic. Basically they have disallowed hot linking and 3rd party hosting on all of their accounts except the 399 USD per year one. This means unless you pony up the big bucks you can no longer host images there and show them elsewhere. Its all over the tech sites out there and photographers and others are really steamed about this tactic.

I would suggest you download any pictures you have remaining on PhotoBucket if you don't have them locally. Forums that unlike this one don't allow direct picture uploads are showing lots of threads with no pictures as it appears PhotoBucket was popular with modelers for storing their images.

In your case just download your sig and upload it here.

 

[Lucky13]

As I said earlier....photobucket can go and f*ck themselves....

 

[Wurger]

Copied that.

Jan, if you want you may replace your sigygy with the one posted in the thread for your siggy here. Marcel has uploaded it directly into our server. Copy its URL and paste it into the line in the Signature window. Of course the one with the pb URL should be deleted from there. Then save.

 

[at6]

Was just over at the FSM site and people are really up set over there too about PB.

 

[Lucky13]

They're in for sh*itstorm now, the stupid c*nts....

 

[MiTasol]

They're in for sh*itstorm now, the stupid c*nts....

They will lose lots of customers but unfortunately some will be silly enough to cough up the ransom

 

[stona]

This is not a scam. As an ex Photobucket user I had quite a few images (4000+) uploaded to the service, if I now want to 'hotlink' any of those images from their servers to display elsewhere I will have to pay the $399 per year subscription. There isn't a snowball's chance in hell of that happening, so, sadly, images I posted here and elsewhere via Photobucket will no longer be visible.
I stopped using the service as it was, basically, crap but that doesn't make me feel any better about being held to ransom by the company.
One source states that Photobucket has/had 100 million registered users and holds 10 billion images. Most of those 100 million users are now extremely pissed off and will be hoping that, like me, they have stored those images elsewhere and that they can abandon Photobucket which will hopefully be out of business in the near future.
I've deleted my account which I opened in 2008, I hope most of the other 100 million will follow suit.
Cheers
Steve

 

[Gnomey]

They're in for sh*itstorm now, the stupid c*nts....

Basically sums it up...

 

[parsifal]

I think Jan is a bit cranky. stand back everyone....

 

[Robert Porter]

With reason, this is basically corporate piracy ethically speaking. It is perfectly legal... and perfectly wrong. By the way I have spoken to several users who have paid the minimum one month paid subscription which unlocks their photos. This gave them enough time to download their library and then close their account. There is a possibility the backlash and loss of business may make them rethink their position, but in the unlikely event they do back pedal I think it will only be a temporary reprieve.

 

[turbo]

What they're doing is a pile of cr@p. I don't use third party hosting sites for anything other than backup for this very reason. I have all my images backed up in the cloud on Google Drive but external hard drives (eg >2 Tb) are so cheap nowadays I keep a local copy of everything and upload images to this site directly from my computer.

If my third party backup provider goes out of business or pulls some sort of pricing sh!t like this then I simply shut it down and upload a new backup from my local copy to a new provider.

 

[MiTasol]

What they're doing is a pile of cr@p. I don't use third party hosting sites for anything other than backup for this very reason. I have all my images backed up in the cloud on Google Drive but external hard drives (eg >2 Tb) are so cheap nowadays I keep a local copy of everything and upload images to this site directly from my computer.

If my third party backup provider goes out of business or pulls some sort of pricing sh!t like this then I simply shut it down and upload a new backup from my local copy to a new provider.

Partially agreed - I use Dropbox to transfer files and never never upload anything that can be used by a hacker so I will never use cloud backup (4TB external hard drives are so cheap now anyway). If Dropbox falls over (unlikely I know) then I have lost nothing.

The reason?

There is another company that screwed the pooch similar to what PB is doing about ten years ago.

Microsoft decided to reduce the Hotmail account space and deleted all the oldest files to bring customers down to the new size BEFORE notifying customers of the change.

Many thousands of tourists who were emailing their tourist photos to themselves, rather than getting them cut to CD, and using hotmail as a temporary storage site until they returned home. They collectively lost millions of photos, and that was just one group of disgruntled users.

The clear message - never trust an online company with the potential to screw you by a unilateral changing of the goal posts.

PB appear to think Martin Shkreli ( Pharma Bro) is a good role model and obviously do not know or care that he is currently the most hated man in the USA

 

[parsifal]

I feel old and obsolete. ive never used an online third party hosting. didn't even know all these capabilities existed until this blew up.. ive always just saved to an external hard drive. but then, I don't even have a mobile phone

 

[turbo]

That's probably not a bad thing Michael! Just make sure you keep a backup copy of your important pictures on a hard drive you keep off your premises (eg at a family member's house)

 

[stona]

With reason, this is basically corporate piracy ethically speaking. It is perfectly legal... and perfectly wrong.

Whilst I agree with this and am a thoroughly disgruntled ex-customer myself, there are reasons they did this. Basically hosting such large amounts of data and making it readily accessible from anywhere in the world has become more expensive than the intrusive and ever increasing advertising on the site could ever pay for. Essentially the business model on which free hosting was built doesn't work anymore. This doesn't make me feel any better about being had over a barrel. I doubt that Photobucket will be the last to adopt some kind of similar policy to allow it to continue in business.

I used Photobucket to allow me to hotlink images to sites that didn't make it easy or possible to upload them directly, but I always stored my images safely elsewhere. This has made it easy for me to tell Photobucket to go f*ck themselves.

Cheers

Steve

 

[Robert Porter]

I agree Steve, what I am talking about however is not them attempting to recoup costs that advertising no longer covers, that is perfectly fine. Rather it is the fact that with no notice they lowered the amount of "free" disk space. This caused accounts to lock and the only way to unlock them was to pay for a membership, even if all you wanted to do was download your photos to recover them. I have never used PhotoBucket, and the sites I have used were never the sole repository for my pictures or files, I always back those up locally on portable hard drives.

Their arbitrary change in the Terms of Service came with no warning or lead time. Members were notified retroactively after the fact. Which in itself is fine, but when they then leave you no way to access your content unless you pay is to me unethical. They should have provided a heads up and a period of time where users could either get their accounts into compliance or otherwise make arrangements. As I say legal, but unethical.

 

[stona]

Their arbitrary change in the Terms of Service came with no warning or lead time. Members were notified retroactively after the fact. Which in itself is fine, .

I don't think that is fine at all and judging by the reaction on the internet not many others (apart from Photobucket's management) do either. The only notice the company gave was a note published on 26th June advising users to "take a moment to review our updated terms and policies". Not good enough.

Hopefully, not too many will pay what can only be described as a ransom. There is no way of knowing whether Photobucket will still be in business a month or so down the line, you may well be throwing your money away, paying for a service which will not be provided.

I travel for work quite a bit and in order to access British TV services like the BBC iplayer I use a VPN. I had a very good service for many years from a company called iPortal. Before my last monthly subscription I received a very nice email, thanking me for my business and explaining that at the end of the following month the service would be terminated, the company could not compete with bigger international services and was calling it a day. This courtesy allowed me more than a month to research and sort out an alternative arrangement. I did not feel ripped off or held to ransom, in fact I felt sorry that the company felt that it was unable to continue to provide what had been an excellent service. That's the way to do business.
Photobucket has an email address for every subscriber, yet couldn't be bothered to make one email shot to inform of the coming changes? Pathetic. I think you Americans call this sort of business model 'sharp practice'

Cheers

Steve

 

[Robert Porter]

My answer was poorly worded, what they did was not fine in my book either. What I meant was it was fine for them to change the terms of service, it is their business and right. But the way they went about it was not at all fine!