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End of a free ride?

apintofmild

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Is this going to knock on to TypeAccord?

https://petapixel.com/2017/07/01/photobucket-just-broke-billions-photos-embedded-web/

TBH their site is pretty horrible, but their hosting seems to work well. Or at least it did.

Has anyone a suggestion for a similar (free) service? If existing hosted images go off line will it be possible to edit original TA posts to fix broken links? There's nothing worse than a picture heavy post that promises to tell you exactly what you need to know only to find it empty :unsure:

For what it's worth I have most of my DIYs as PDFs in case of just this outcome, for my own benefit or in case anyone wants them.
 
It has already happened to a few TA forum members (several threads), and that will increase over time as photobucket's software detects the requests from the embedded images.

Where photobucket has been extensively used, it will be a huge work-load for administrators of each forum to change all the links as and when/if each forum member has re-uploaded the pics to a new hosting site. If a forum's administrators aren't up to the work-load then the hit-rate on the forum will rapidly go down as and when the pics go missing in the threads, so advertising income will go down.

Facebook Groups are slowly capturing more and more car forum traffic. But then what happens when Facebook start to charge for Groups ?
 
Well, as we're not alone in this and it's going to have a massive impact upon millions of people, let's give it a few days and see how the dust settles. A work around and/or change of policy (at photo bucket's end) might come into play... Who knows.

In the meantime, it might be worth exploring alternatives. If anyone has ideas or suggestions, go for it.
 
if you have your own cloud storage (samsung/one drive/synology etc) you can always use that... the space is your own
 
I was thinking along the lines of Google Drive or something similar, yes.
 
There's no way to know Jon. We've had similar things hit the indie music scene from time to time with hosting sites like SoundCloud drastically changing the way things work with free uploading. I've learned through things like this happening in the past to essentially take the rough with the smooth. Nothing's a certainty, the internet's still in its infancy and we have to face these challenges in the best way at that given time. Nothing's truly future proof.

I'll be interested to see how the dust settles on this in a few more days once people really start to feel the impact of it... We may find Photobucket do a U-turn, or at least back pedal to an extent. On the other hand, they may be in financial problems and this is an act of necessity and/or desperation. They could go bankrupt and close down in the future and we'd be in the same situation, essentially.

Let's see how things are in a few days and while we wait, brainstorm possible solutions around it.
 
IMO photobucket has done all forums a favour by ringing the death-knell for any forum that is not prepared to supply or rent their own image-hosting storage. HK has been doing this for a long time, which means that users can upload directly from their own device onto HK's site (HK does have an issue with older images which occurred when they migrated another forum into HK, but that's a different issue and I think they still have the images somewhere).

Photobucket's ringing of the bell makes it clear that any forum wishing to continue long-term must have the same strategy. A forum cannot rely on users posting images to different hosting sites, nor to one single hosting site. IMO if a forum isn't prepared to come up with a long-term solution for storage of images, then there is no long-term existence for that forum : I'm not singling out this forum, just stating the obvious .

This is very informative --> https://www.ghacks.net/2017/07/02/photobucket-alternatives-for-third-party/
I would quote from it, but best to read it oneself (it's not long and it's well written).
 
And to think last week I put 3 de-commissioned hp blade servers in the skip, 80tb a piece. Never crossed my mind to miss the skip and have one land in my boot.....
 
aye but the problem then is renting a line with high-bandwidth in the outgoing direction, and also suitable software to serve the images and prevent hacking.
 
Used to use Photobucket years ago when i first joined on a forum (2002 I believe)

Google photos and Flickr are what i use. Google is free
 
But free for how long (at least in relation to third-party use)? We don't know, and there's the problem... ideally our forum needs to host its own images, but I appreciate that this could cost a small fortune.
 
"Use a picture. It's worth a thousand words." ......nobody wants to write 4000 words to describe how to fix something when 4 pictures do it for you, and nobody wants to read 4000 words either.

The best solution is to insert http links to images rather than embed the images . This can already be done retrospectively right now on the photobucket images and photobucket can continue to be used that way. Either make TA pages editable to each TA user, or moderators will have to change the links. Someone on TA is going to have to do something, 4 photobucket accounts are now affected, won't be long before they all are

The other solution is for a forum to host its own images, which would only cost £308.44 for a year (at today's exchange rate). All the images in the most important DIY threads can be uploaded to the forum's account by mods. It's going to require some dedication though :eek:
 
We're looking into it, but it's far from a simple fix unfortunately. I know it's going to be the cause of some frustrations for a few days, but if everyone can just hold tight and be patient, we'll try and figure something out before long.
 
An extremely simple, albeit temporary, solution would be to search for all BB code that begins with ...
[ img ] i
or
[ img ] http: //i

without spaces
and then remove the BB code

e.g. in this thread --> http://typeaccord.co.uk/forum/topic/23660-speed-limiter/

the image as below (which has the img BB code)

20170625_045121_zps5wzjsgy2.jpg



and here is thew link with the BB code removed

http://i328.photobucket.com/albums/l359/goodluckmonkey/Mobile%20Uploads/20170625_045121_zps5wzjsgy2.jpg

which now works when you click on it

temporary solution, simple solution, but works.
 
WTF !!! ????

the embedded image now works, both above and in the original thread that I took it from :eek:

another image by goodluckmonkey in this link is still not working --> http://typeaccord.co.uk/forum/topic/23633-what-song-makes-you-drive-too-fast/


there's something very strange going on with images that are cached from photobucket

I've noticed odd caching from photobucket many times in the past, I was never sure (and still am unsure) where the caching takes place, it's definitely not caching on the local platform
 
Not for me it doesn't :unsure:

that said, the image doesn't show up when I follow the link either... :huh:

Edit: If I switch off my AdBlocker, it shows up when I follow the link
 
^ and you might now see it in the thread

photobucket's "complaint" is about embedded images, which are made by using BB code

my understanding is that as long as an image is not embedded, photobucket don't mind

and I think that applies to all photo hosting sites, AFAIK none like their site being used for free to facilitate the embedding of images
 
I now understand photobucket's standpoint on this

They rely on income form advertising, which is based on hit-count.

Once an image is uploaded and then embedded elsewhere, that image does not generate income for them.

This will apply to any image hosting site that relies on income from advertising, so if anyone decides to start uploading the images to another image hosting site to use it for image embedding elsewhere, if that site already has some advertising, that site will eventually do the same thing that photobucket has done.

By putting a direct link instead, it will keep the image hosting site "happy" .
 
due to TA limited editing time, we can't go back and edit images that we have already posted, but moderators/admin can, as in my #16 here --> http://typeaccord.co.uk/forum/topic/23681-end-of-a-free-ride/?p=246488

There are at least 3 ways to post direct links to images
1. find the "Direct" link in photobucket which will begin with http://i
2. find the "IMG" link in photobucket, then remove all the BB code stuff, which should leave you with same as you'd get in 1.
3. right-click on an image, "open in new tab", if necessary keep doing this until you get a url ending in jpg, then copy and paste that url (which should be same as you'd get in 1.)
 
Jon_G said:
But free for how long (at least in relation to third-party use)? We don't know, and there's the problem... ideally our forum needs to host its own images, but I appreciate that this could cost a small fortune.
I have 17GB on my google drive, 105GB on MS One Drive, people can get these, and also the usual drop box etc to upload pics to forums - I am not counting my Synology storage which probably is ample to host some entire web forums itself.

Dont see how you can ever get charged for this, unless the fee is upgrading storage space which is a seperate thing.
 
toffee_pie said:
I have 17GB on my google drive, 105GB on MS One Drive, people can get these, and also the usual drop box etc to upload pics to forums - I am not counting my Synology storage which probably is ample to host some entire web forums itself.

Dont see how you can ever get charged for this, unless the fee is upgrading storage space which is a seperate thing.
Let's not get storage confused with image hosting

Image hosting allows an image to be embedded elsewhere.

Embedding an image can be done either using html, or by use of BB code. For obvious reasons, forums use BB code in their posts.

The BB code for embedding an image is (without spaces)
[ img ] url-of-an-image-the url-ending-in-jpg-or-png [ /img ]

For example, in BBC sport pages --> http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/40488056 there is an image.
If you right-click on the image and "open image in new tab" you get the image in a new tab, and then you can copy the url
Here is the url of the image --> http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/onesport/cps/624/cpsprodpb/126DF/production/_96678457_ham_vet_rage.png

If I want to embed the image I place IMG BB code round the url
[ img ] http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/onesport/cps/624/cpsprodpb/126DF/production/_96678457_ham_vet_rage.png [ /img ]

If I write that without spaces the image is now embedded
_96678457_ham_vet_rage.png



Note that IMG BB code will only work with urls ending in .jpg or .png , so if you have a url for an image that does not end in .jpg or .png it cannot be embedded in a post in a forum.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but google drive and onedrive do not facilitate url's ending in .jpg or .png

The issue with photobucket is that they now host over 10 billion images from between 50 to 100 million users.

I would suggest that a very high percentage of those users only use photobucket for image hosting on forums, thus photobucket are probably experiencing huge amounts of traffic from their servers, most of which results in zero advertising revenue.

Wikipedia has a good list of image hosting sites --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_image-sharing_websites

If you look at the list, you will see that Imgur has an unknown number of users, and if you go to the wiki page on Imgur you'll see that it has overtaken Photobucket in popularity and is mainly funded by donations. But IMO as users switch from Photobucket to Imgur to host pictures on forums, Imgur will eventually face the same problem of huge volumes of traffic from embedded images, and so they may well end up either banning users who only use Imgur for image hosting, or introduce a fee.

Finally, as I've already pointed out, photbucket can still be used by placing the image url in a post without surrounding it with the BB code, but that will not embed the image.
 
I've just noticed that photobucket have now done a similar thing to direct links as well
i.e. you see the "blocked" image appear in photobucket even when you click on a "direct" link.

You now have to click on a "direct" link, then right-click on the "blocked" image on that page, and open the image in a new tab.

I presume that they did this to totally prevent embedded images re-appearing.

So there is no easy/temporary solution at all. Big work ahead for admin/mods of most forums in the world.
 
I don't know much about how forums work under the bonnet, nor what powers admins have, but could this (with the image host's cooperation) work?

Forum admins run a script to modify all embedded (Photobucket) images in all posts to replace the <IMG> tags with <URL> tags making the image a clickable link.
Photobucket intercepts the image request and serves not the isolated image file, but a whole page containing the image complete with their chosen targeted advertising, banners etc.

Forum posts wouldn't look as nice, but it would help preserve years of historic content around the web whilst generating (some) revenue for the image host.

As for the current model, personally I'd be more interested in some kind of micropayment scenario, say on a per-image basis. There is no way I'm paying hundreds of dollars to host images that I gain nothing from other than the satisfaction of contributing to a community of like minded people. But I might pay a few cents per image per year. If everyone did that I'd wager they'd gain more than by having millions of disgruntled ex-users and a handful of people paying through the nose.
 
In forum posts, the BB code --> [ URL ] http;//www.bc.co.uk [ /URL ] (without the spaces) ......usually gives same result as placing http://ww.bbc.co.uk without the "URL" BB code . Note that it's the latter which photobucket label as "Direct" in the links that they provide

That "direct" link (with or without "URL" BB code) is what I proposed in #16 but photobucket have now also "killed" these types of link from opening, so that a "block" image opens on a photobucket page itself. You have to then right-click on that "bock" image in photobucket and open the image in a new tab. Explaining this double-action sequence would become a recurrent heme throughout forums.


But yes, nobody is going to pay $400 to be able to embed a few pictures in a forum.
 
Update.

On some of the pictures, if you right-click on the picture and "open in new tab", then go to the new tab, then right click on that picture and "open image in new tab", then go to that tab .....you can sometimes see the original picture there. If so, quickly right-click again and use "save as" to save it to disc.

Alternatively, if the photobucket account-holder (of the pictures) did not make the folder private, navigate to the "root" of the folder, then bookmark that folder. Quit your browser, delete all photobucket cookies, then re-open that folder and you should be able to see the pictures (but with very heavy advertising in the way).
 
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