Photobucket - Arrrrghhh!

[danson67]

Are Photobucket's new plans of any use for getting all those dead image links back up and viewable on the forum?


It's not clear to me whether or not the monthly fees are for the forum owner to pay, or the individual picture poster.

-If it's the individuals who need to pay up to have their images viewable on the forum, then good luck with that...RB is screwed. However, there are phpBB fixes out there if the powers that be at RB can be arsed to sort this out.
-If it's the Forum owner who pays Photobucket to make the links live, then surely John can cough up $10.33 a month to keep the information (and this forum) alive?

Perhaps he/we/mods could get access just long enough to hoover up the images and post them as attachments instead, or host them somewhere else if bandwidth is a problem? This has been done by many other photo-heavy forums?
If he and the mods were more responsive to the membership, we might be more willing to even pay for it ourselves somehow.

It's not much, I'd be in...


PS: Apparently PhotoBucket is down to 10 employees from 120 staff 10 yrs ago, so we'd better snag those images back soon or thousands of RB threads will be broken forever.

All the best,

 

[mk one]

It needs sorting, lets save (reclaim) the images!!!

mark

 

[danson67]

Re:

Reply from Drew at PB ([email protected]) regarding Forum owner subscription this evening:

"Hello Dan,

Unfortunately, we do not have this kind of subscription model that you are describing. All the subscription plans we have right now are just for individual users. I have forwarded this to our team to see if this is something Photobucket will need to consider adding in the future.

In the past couple of months, our management team has temporarily restored all the photos that have been previously restricted for 3rd Party hosting. At this time, we do not have a time frame when these images will be restricted again, however, we will notify our users ahead of time when these changes are about to happen.

We have also made our subscription plans more affordable, adding monthly payment options for our users who cannot afford to subscribe annually. We hope that this will provide our users with better hosting options."

So the quicker we hoover up the images and archive them locally the better.

All the best,

 

[NeilM]

Re: Re:

Reply from Drew at PB ([email protected]) regarding Forum owner subscription this evening:

"Hello Dan,

Unfortunately, we do not have this kind of subscription model that you are describing. All the subscription plans we have right now are just for individual users. I have forwarded this to our team to see if this is something Photobucket will need to consider adding in the future.

In the past couple of months, our management team has temporarily restored all the photos that have been previously restricted for 3rd Party hosting. At this time, we do not have a time frame when these images will be restricted again, however, we will notify our users ahead of time when these changes are about to happen.

We have also made our subscription plans more affordable, adding monthly payment options for our users who cannot afford to subscribe annually. We hope that this will provide our users with better hosting options."

So the quicker we hoover up the images and archive them locally the better.

All the best,

So it's taken them all this time to realise that the mass migration of users has everything to do with third party hosting. :facepalm:

 

[legrandefromage]

So many dead links to quality bikes lost forever not helped by equally defunct users.

 

[The History Man]

I've been [paying $2.99 a month forever. Going to cancel soon. I now resize on the mac before posting. Been seeing if it was a ball ache but it's not too bad.

 

[natalymalcon88]

I'm using Postimage

 

[danson67]

OK Owner, Mods and admins...

Now that Photobucket has (reluctantly and probably temporarily) restored the links to pictures, perhaps it would be time to actively hoover up the images to secure the past threads on Retrobike in case PB pull he plug again.

The solution is out there if you can be arsed to look:
Here is the coding from Github: https://github.com/v12mike/fetch-external-images or for phpBB 3.1 https://github.com/v12mike/imageredirect

Here is the descrition of what it does:

I have run these scripts on 2 forums, downloading about 20,000 and 15,000 image files. The scripts create local image files which are named as the md5 of the original url, this allows easy redirection of links without needing extra database accesses at run-time. On my 2 forums, the local images are now being served with a modified version of the camoimageproxy extension. I intend to upload that after it is tidied up. The database tables created by these scripts would however allow several other schemes for serving or redirecting the forum image links...
Sat Jul 08, 2017 7:24 pm
I have updated the scripts on github, the extraction script now catalogues and downloads all external image files, not just photobucket. The download script now does not follow redirects, and does not save very small files (which are usually failure notices). There are also a couple of bug fixes.

I don't understand the coding and neither have access or the knowledge to install this.
No doubt there is someone here on the forum who could if you don't have the knowledge, just ask.

You just need to pull your bloody fingers out and get this sorted. :?

All the best,

 

[SEANSTEPHENS]

Re:

the people who gave in to the blackmail and paid must be pissed right now. for me the release of my 3rd party photos isn't enough to make me use the site again, and im sure its no less bugged and cluttered with ads than it had become before