Transport Tycoon Forums

Hello TT-users of the forums...

Today I found out about this sad and frustrating news...Photobucket now charges $399 for third-party hosted images !!

Am I the only one who has this problem ? All of my images on the forum are useless all of a sudden...I'm not sure if this is all true, but I found this news on a website today:

"If you have visited a website recently that displays images hosted on Photobucket, or are embedding images hosted on Photobucket on your own, you may have had a rather rude awakening one day as Photobucket decided to block these images from being displayed on third-party sites. All Photobucket images hosted on third-party sites, at least from what we can tell, are replaced by a dummy image. It reads: Please update your account to enable 3rd party hosting. For important info, please go to www.photobucket.com/P500.

Photobucket defines third-party hosting (what is with using 3rd instead of third?) as embedding an image or photo on another website. This includes embedding photos on forums, eBay, Etsy, Craigslist or another other site on the Internet that is not Photobucket.com. When you open the referenced page on the Photobucket website, you are informed that you may restore the third-party hosted content by becoming a Plus 500 subscriber. A Plus 500 plan allows for unlimited third-party hosting, and provides members with other benefits such as an ad-free browsing environment on the Photobucket site, priority customer support, or full resolution photo storage. Photobucket offers three paid plans to members, but only the most expensive plan supports third-party hosting of images. It is available for $39.99 per month, or at a discount when billed yearly for $399.99.

According to Photobucket, the site has more than 100 million unique users who have stored more than 15 billion images on its servers.

For users who are affected by this, it is important to note that the images are not gone. They are still hosted on Photobucket, and you can actually load them right then and there by right-clicking on them and selecting "open image in new tab" or "open link in new tab" depending on the web browser that you are using. This opens the Photobucket website where the original image is displayed. The problem right now is however that Photobucket has been used as a host for images for years on many sites on the Internet. And it is not even the case that the site owner can do something about it if other members of the site have embedded photos from Photobucket as the disabling is account linked.

All members of a site who used Photobucket in the past would have to sign up for the -- rather expensive I might say -- Plus 500 plan to restore the old functionality. This is not practicable at all, and it won't happen. As far as alternatives are concerned, there is Imgur for instance which supports the embedding of images on third-party sites.

While members of Photobucket may wait and hope that the company reverses the stance on third-party hosted images, it is probably better to migrate the photos to another hosting service entirely. You can download your entire library of images by selecting Library on Photobucket, and there the download album link under actions.

Photobucket may make a quick buck from the unannounced change, as some members may feel pressured in paying up so that their images are displayed again on third-party sites. I think however that many more will leave Photobucket and use another service instead for image hosting. This may be fueled by site-wide bans of the service.

The plan is overpriced in my opinion, not only because there are free alternatives available out there, but also because you may sign up for a VPS or web hosting account instead for a fraction of the price that Photobucket charges. Even if it would be priced reasonably, and Photobucket has any right to adjust its pricing, blocking images without prior notice or migration options, especially since this was free before, is not the most elegant of ways to go about it."

I have now deleted my account on Photobucket, but I'm not sure how to fix the problem on all of the forum-pages where my photo's and screenshots can be seen as most of the pages cannot be edited anymore. In the mean time I'm going to try to find a way to upload some of my pictures via other (free) websites. Is it possible to edit pages that previously couldn't be edited so I (and maybe many other members here) can restore their photo's ? Anyway I still lost a lot of pictures because I do not have the account settings for older accounts that I used to have on Photobucket

Perhaps the moderators of the TT-Forums have a solution for that ?

Regards,

Erik

I keep hearing about this problem for the past few days, but haven't been effected (yet). See example below.

I've been using Photobucket for a loooooong time. More than 10 years... i think... wonder if that has anything to do with it.

I just dump everything onto my own image host (IMGHST). I got fedup with mainstream hosts getting more and more annoying to use, needing accounts, needing to do things specifically so i just got fedup and did my own little quick drag & drop thing. When i first used photobucket, no accounts, just upload, ta-da. Now it's just... urgh.
Photobucket also won't let me view links on their site due to an adblocker. So can only view images that directly link to it outside of Photobuckets control.


(Speaking of which, I need to chat to Owen about more bandwidth for that...)

Dropbox could be a fair replacement, but unless you had many phones it's quite small storage (basic is 2GB, more needs subscription). To do it, just replace the 'www.dropbox.com' into dl.dropboxusercontent.com .

For posts here, use the attachment feature - that's what it's there for, and as long as the forums are here, the attachments will be here too.

orudge wrote:For posts here, use the attachment feature - that's what it's there for, and as long as the forums are here, the attachments will be here too.

Would it justify to rando-upload things into this forum just so they could be linked to others which lack attachments feature ?

YNM wrote:

orudge wrote:For posts here, use the attachment feature - that's what it's there for, and as long as the forums are here, the attachments will be here too.

Would it justify to rando-upload things into this forum just so they could be linked to others which lack attachments feature ?

I used to PM myself an attachment so I could link an image URL

Personally, I stopped using photobucket years ago. It became a bit of a pain and I wasn't happy with the site or privacy settings at the time.
If this really is the case with them and they are planing to introduce this 'pay to share' type system for everyone... then I'd say they can kiss their butts good bye.

There's literally hundreds of img-sharing pages out there; one's got to be OK.

Personally I'm using tinypic, but it recently wasn't very good either. I'm just too lazy to search for something else.

YNM wrote:Would it justify to rando-upload things into this forum just so they could be linked to others which lack attachments feature ?

Unless they are in some way relevant to TT-Forums, I'd generally prefer it if you didn't...

If you use a third party service then there is always risk that the posts becomes ridden with dead images.

I would always recommend against using any third party for images. It is a bad practice.