Re: Photobucket Just Screwed Me Real Hard
2. I have raid 2 drives at home on a server (ie internally backed up, so to speak) and I burn a Blue Ray M disc every month and take it to the inlaws. Every file my wife and I store on the server is backed up. Could do a cloud backup for this but dont need the overhead on my connection.
Be wary. Optical media degrades more quickly than you might think; which is why some discs cost a fortune and others seem reasonable. You'd do well to keep some enterprise-rated drives on hand to back up those discs, as well.
3. I just dont understand why people dont upload photos to the forum on which they post.
Partially because forums delete them or can prevent you from deleting them.
Partially to take the load off of smaller forums.
Partially to more easily put pictures where you need them in posts that feature incremental description.
Partially because those little thumbnails are hard to sort through when scrolling down through a long thread.
Partially because joke posts don't work if someone has to click on the punchline.
Mainly because it's one of the few ways to get "For Sale" information to look right in some places, or give people enough information and much more detailed images.
4. What is the scope of this issue, really? Ive seen the blue 'no thrid party hosting notices'.... so yes, links are hosed. But how coercive is their decision?
Countless auctions full of pictures, with bids placed and in progress have been ruined. Each one will have to be tossed out the window and started again. Do you have any idea what restarting an auction does to bidders?
They run off.
People that had a hard time and needed lots of help posting how-to guides on forums now have seen their threads broken; and who's going to help them now to rebuild all those old threads?
I'm not going to rebuild any of mine. Screw it.
Does PB prevent you from downloading your own images at this point? Are they demanding $400 to simply access your own images???
That's happened to people, and it's why I immediately downloaded and deleted all my images from their site the second this appeared to become legitimate.
I didn't believe the story at first, because it just seemed so damned stupid.
5. Can you sign up with a credit card, save your data- then take it up with your credit card company? Has anyone looked at the old Ts&Cs, and seen if this new policy is perhaps, uh, vulnerable?
No way in hell I'd give them financial information now. The site was terrible anyway; requiring the use of ad blockers to even make it functional at times, which is the exact
wrong way to load advertisements.
I'd be willing to pay to host images for hotlinking, but I wouldn't pay Photobucket.
I should think someone would have held a conference or at least sent out a notice to a few people who can reach others if this wasn't something they did intentionally.
If it was, they should have assured people they could download their images for a period of time, and given a couple of weeks notice at least to find other hosting solutions if they were going to jack the price that high.
If it wasn't intentional... Too bad. You're still done, because you didn't warn people.
Photobucket was never a professionally-run operation. If they'd have picked up the ball and run with it, more people might be giving them the benefit of the doubt, but they never did. It was **** piled on ****, and I was about a month away from deleting my account anyway.
What's really ******* me off is Google is probably going to pick up the slack, and that's all they need; more people jumping over each other to give Google one more piece of the damned pie. I'd rather
Photobucket have kept it.
The problem Photobucket
had is nobody needed their service. They offered no unique benefits, and indeed their site was terrible. I'm not the only one that stuck around solely because I didn't feel like signing up for something else.
I have the originals of all my photos but I feel even worse for those who don't and have exclusively been using PB. 
