Great Western Coffee Shop

Just come across this post on a blog which has interesting ramifications for anyone using Photobucket to host pictures on here - or another forum.

http://blog.norphil.co.uk/2017/06/photobucket-alert-new-sort-of-ransom.html (http://blog.norphil.co.uk/2017/06/photobucket-alert-new-sort-of-ransom.html)

I notice that BNM's photo grab of Paddington (in the author's death thread) has already gone....

One of many I'm afraid.   Found quite a few threads which make a lot less sense now.

Just over 900 posts on the Coffee Shop have embedded images from Photobucket.  Further analysis to follow.

All of mine here are hosted on photobucket.

Graham could it be considered to allow larger attachments with them hosted by the forum? At least then something like this won't see us lose a load of content in future?

From the post BobM quoted:

Maximum attachment size here is 1 Mbyte ... reluctant to increase that as that should be plenty for images backing up regular posts and we've not got the resource / capacity for becoming a photo bucket replacement.   Suggest people grab pictures from the Fox site, resize and amend posts to show them resized.   May review decision / advise later; this is a first reaction

Three members have over 50 posts that use photobucket - between those three members accounting for almost 700 of the images that will / may appear broken.   One other member who's inactive has 45, no-one else more than 20.   I will message the three most effected.

Money grabbing bar stewards!!! They want $399 a year for embedding MY photos in other websites.

With no notice or consultation either. Gits.

I suspect I'm the user with the most Photobucket embedded images on this forum. I'm in the process of downloading all my photos hosted on Photobucket and moving them to another site. Will take some time as I'm using an old laptop, having packed my PC away ready for a house move.

I've done a test post edit in the Michael Bond (Paddington Bear) (http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=18405.0) thread where I've hotlinked the image I originally embedded with Photobucket, using my Google Drive cloud storage instead.

I will try to repair some other recent threads over the coming weeks, but sadly it'll be very difficult to repair them all as most hosted photos were in a general album with no reference to a particular topic or post.

Photobucket. Ash holes.  >:( >:( >:(

If you have all of the images from a general album downloaded with a name that can be linked to a URL, we may be able to find the right ones and put hosted copies on our space to correct the current situation.   In other words, if they're all together on a memory stick I may be able to automate the update.  Probably impractical to upload the whole lot to our site without filtering, or to email to me.

Note - such help is done as a "best endeavours" offer; under the forum agreement, members remain responsible for their content.

I'm in the process of downloading all my content from Photobucket to a USB hard drive.

I've massaged a few photo attachments down in size to around about (or even less than) 100 Kb - and they have seemed to be quite adequate for the purpose of illustrating a point in a post, I don't think current size limits are much of a problem.   

Just means you cannot upload a typical image straight off a high definition camera or phone without a couple of minutes work really.

Paul

The only problem with using the forum attachment method is that some browsers don't show the image by default. Users have to click on them to open them. 

They also appear at the bottom of a post which isn't always the best place if you have accompanying text descriptions.

Nope. Ancient laptop hasn't got the oomph. Mobile devices haven't got the capacity. I'm going to have to wait until PC is unpacked at new home. Couple of weeks.

Edited to add:

It appears that downloading from Photobucket may be problematical at the moment. The website and app keeps crashing. No doubt caused by many thousands of pissed off users wanting to download their photos. They've done an excellent job of alienating many long term users (I've been with them since 2006) in one fell swoop. I'm cancelling my extra storage and ad free subscriptions once I can recover my photos.

(https://drive.google.com/uc?id=0B8VBuNEcQ7EgYTRwd3BES2VqaGM)

Not sure if I am missing something here. I guess I am one of the three as I have received a message from Graham. I have a free account with Photobucket, but my images are apparently still viewable here....

as an aside......... where was I when this picture was taken?

(http://i725.photobucket.com/albums/ww255/PhilWakely/PB060454_zps5mgacjpc.jpg)

I've just tried to post a Photobucket image again. Not working for me.

Like Phil I have a free account, and looking back my pics on forum are still viewable (at present)

It sounds like the implementation of the rules for the lower an no cost accounts is being rolled out rather than globally applied across Photobucket.  Whether they plan to implement / apply software changes to every server or every account to enforce the new terms I wouldn't like to guess. If I were hosting there I would be making darned sure I had a backup of all my pictures - I wonder if they might make other changes as they further monetarise their investment in storing and serving your pictures.

I wonder if it's an attempt to make some quick money to avoid going under, following fotopics route. Some web hosts have commented elsewhere they've 1000s of photos hosted on photobucket and it will destroy their whole website, so feel paying up is the only way to avoid their websites going.

There is a logic to building up a business and accepting a loss in the early days, then looking to recoup those losses when you have a base of customers who are committed to / reliant on you.  Should your business start as a small organisation and be swallowed into a bigger one, the metrics can adjust with the bigger organisation that has bought your requiring a return on its investment on its (the parent's) timescale even if that means a loss of the previous friendly approach.

I see no logic in holding people's photos to ransom and ruining thousands of forums, blogs and websites.

I've now downloaded all my pictures from Photobucket and I believe this forum's Admins are looking at ways to get them back into the many ruined threads. Good luck bobm and grahame and thanks in advance for putting the work in.

We are ... but we need a copy of the raw data from you, or links to alternative hosting and a pattern of how to map the old names to the new.

I've sent bobm my Photobucket pictures.

All received and we are working on it now.

Just to help us it seems when downloaded from Photobucket the names of all the folders are changed from the URLs used to embed them.  The actual filename isn't changed but the rest of the path is so we are now trying to see of we can match the new folder name to the old path.

Provided that the file name is the same and we can forecast the target directory, I expect I can write a script for the purpose to point to the new location for the handful of users who have the biggest problems (with their posts  ;D ) . But I'm out of the door / travelling in an hour or two and not sure when I'll next have a connection good enough (and a time quiet enough) for remote coding.

More links to comments on the general story.

http://uk.pcmag.com/webcom/90124/news/photobucket-breaks-image-links-across-the-internet
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t=5671481
https://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/111497-photobucket-and-third-party-hosting/

Comments on their Facebook page since this change are almost entirely negative.

They have started replying to criticism but I see no acknowledgement of the damage they've caused to thousands of websites.

A change to Terms of Service is their prerogative but they really should have grandfathered the existing hotlinks. Not held them to ransom.

A timely reminder to us all to keep good backups / not be reliant on any single site / person / company.   And, yes, that means I encourage you to keep backups of important / significant posts you've made here too.

Not sure about anyone else, but none of your recent pics are working for me...

Using Apple product? I believe my hotlinks don't work on iOS browsers. I'm only temporarily using Google Drive to host images until I've got my own photo hosting website set up. Later this month after I've moved house.

Strangely not working in either Safari on iOS or IE via Windows, hence why I though I'd mention it in case you had some IT issues you were otherwise unaware of  :)

I was made aware of the Safari issues. I know they display on Chrome, as that is what I use.

Once I've sorted my own host any photo links since Photobucket went expensive will be edited to new host.

Works fine on Firefox for Windows (54.0.1) FWIW.

BNM your pictures work just fine on both of my iPads.

It is strange - I can see them fine on both iPhone and iPad.   I don't have an Apple computer.

Seemingly a Mac issue then. Anyone have issues with IE or Edge on a PC?

Not here.

I use Chrome, and I can't see them. I am currently downloading my bucket. I have almost everything backed up on hard drives too.

Following up on the Photobucket issues at the start of this month, Bobm and I have now rehosted the images from our most major users that they have used in existing posts on our own servers.  The post contents have not been changed; rather, I have modified the forum code to map the photobucket web addresses in posts to the replacement addresses where the images are stored un-encumbered.

Images we're already hosting (and any others we rehost - there are 2 or 3 smaller sets we still could) appear correctly in existing posts and quotes of those posts too.  They will also appear correctly if used in new posts.   But neither Bob nor I are offering a replacement service for Photobucket which provides the photograph's owners any edit / replace / add to collection facilities - essentially they're an archive, and that archive's uneditable.   Should there be reason to amend a thread so that it no longer shows an image in the future (very rare indeed, but it has happened), we would advise the picture owners to go back and edit their posts that refer to it, to remove the reference or point to an alternative elsewhere; either Bobm or I could also delete images from the archive "in extremes" but the post(s) would need altering anyway if the thread owners didn't want to be showing a broken image.

The Coffee Shop software offers limited hosting of attachments that can be added onto the end of posts - currently we have 2,831 such attachments in our database.   These are of limited size and number per post, and do no appear in-line but as smaller "postage stamps" you can click on at the base of posts, and even these postage stamps are not shown on the "recent posts" display.   Attachments are not suitable for use as a general replacement of in-line images, and at the Coffee Shop we won't be offering a replacement facility to store and serve your pictures as the basic Photobucket account used to do, and the $399 account there still does.   There are other facilities around (I haven't noticed a huge drop in images, so most of you are using something else  :D ) and posts with recommendations and comments as to alternative systems are welcome.   Those of us with our own web service provision (be it dedicated, virtual or shared hosting) also have the alternative of hosting our own images, subject to limitations on the amount of space and bandwidth we pay for;  on my own server, I have nearly 12,000 images for use all over the place, and most of which are distinctly off topic for the forum.

I have some sympathy with the problem that the company running Photobucket  found themselves with - hosting a lot of data for free, yet having to pay for the hosts to hold it.  They are probably not the only hosting service that fallen into this model, with something that started as a little loss leader to attract custom for profitable services having become a drain they can't or won't sustain.   I'm not discussing the legality of their approach to a solution, but it's certainly questionable in terms of breaking a trust they had built up with their base of users, and the web being - err - a web, effects propagate over threads of the web such as the issues it caused in some of our poster's content here, and beyond those posters to people viewing their posts.

Photobucket are probably not the only free content hosting service that find or found themselves providing a service that cost more to provide than the income that was gained (heck, the Coffee Shop falls into that category!!) and so it has to be a very strong recommendation indeed that users keep excellent backups of everything which they cherish - not only images, but other content hosted elsewhere on the web too.

---

I have veered off what I was intending to write here ...

As members switch from one image hoster to another, facilities offered in terms of embedding may change.  In particular, your new service may give you less image scaling capability.  You can use the width= attribute on the img tag here to resize the image, but please bear in mind that the whole image will be downloaded when your post is browsed and this may effect our visitor's bandwidth.

Example:

Here is a normal sized breakfast:

(http://www.wellho.net/pix/bonybreakfast.jpg)

and here is a smaller breakfast:

(http://www.wellho.net/pix/bonybreakfast.jpg)

and I can also put the breakfast in the centre too rather than have it nearly falling off the edge


code (with added spaces to ensure I display the code and don't have the images show up here!

Original:
[ img ]http://www.wellho.net/pix/bonybreakfast.jpg[ /img ]

Smaller:
[ img width=400 ]http://www.wellho.net/pix/bonybreakfast.jpg[ /img ]

Smaller and centered:
[ center ][ img width=400 ]http://www.wellho.net/pix/bonybreakfast.jpg[ /img ][ /center ]

Once I have Internet access up and running at my new address (working to BT timescales so thatll be sometime this summer!) I will be hosting images on my own dedicated website.

Why did you have to use that image? I'm hungry now...  ;D

Wot no Mushrooms or Black Pudding!

I asked for Black Pudding but they had run out ... it's very popular indeed in some parts!

Thank you, grahame, for restoring my images to my earlier posts.

I began researching alternatives to Photobucket as a means of enabling me to post images on the forum. Then I remembered that I had a Flickr account, which came free with my internet service, when BT was allied to Yahoo. When they separated, I thought I had lost the access, and as I hadn't used it much, didn't bother looking any further. However, as I tried to sign up, it became apparent that I still had an account. A bit of password recovery later, and I was in, my old photos still intact.

Unless I have some sort of legacy privilege, it seems all you need is a Yahoo email address, and that is free of charge. Maximum storage is 1TB. Sharing to a Coffee Shop post is similar to using Photobucket. There is a choice of size when obtaining the link from the BB Code tab. The link itself is more detailed than the PB [ IMG] data. You can display it all, including your account name, or you delete everything before [ IMG] and after [ /IMG] to simply post the picture with no other information.

Other similar sites are, no doubt, available.  I also deplore the absence of black pudding and, to a lesser extent. mushrooms.

Should this thread be preserved as a sticky once a few more suggestions have been included?

Revisiting this dormant topic with some not very recent news. Found after I was researching the upcoming changes to Flickr as posted here: http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=20623.0

Photobucket had a change of CEO in March 2018. The new boss quickly and quietly changed the terms of service and subscription plans. Since May 2018 Photobucket has offered much more reasonable pricing covering storage and third party hosting (hotlinking). They also restored all the hotlinks (many millions of images across t'web) that were previously disabled and held to ransom.

No longer do Photobucket users have to pay $399 for a plan that incudes hotlinking. Plans now start at around $4 a month for 25GB of storage. All plans allow you to "embed images anywhere without watermarks".

Welcome changes. Too late for many of us former Photobucket users though. I downloaded all my content off their site and I've no intention of going back. The consequence of their folly is that I now embed far fewer images on this website. You'll note I've not posted a multi-image quiz for ages. What they did has also made me very wary of using other storage/hosting websites for more than just the odd image. I'm down to just using physical media and Google Drive for storage, and online only hosting (imgBB) for the odd individual photo every now and then.. I recently also used Microsoft's Onedrive for storage, but they too have an impending change of terms of service, cutting the free plan from 15GB to 5GB, with deletion of content if its not moved or paid for. The new pricing structure was not affordable for me, so content there was moved to Google Drive.

I never did get round to building my own website for hosting and hotlinking. Again, finances precluded. Without getting too self personal, I'm having to live very frugally at the moment, thanks to the.... no, best not go there. That's for family and close friends only.  :-X

What Photobucket did was one of the worst examples of a corporate mistake, ransoming content and treating users with contempt. They also created headaches for thousands of website administrators worldwide. From the little giants like this Coffee Shop, to web behemoths such as Amazon and eBay. I'm sure grahame and bobm would rather not have had to put in the hours recovering as much as they did.

I think it's clear that Photobucket lost more than just a CEO after the decision to do what they did. They now have just 10 employees, when once there were 120. I imagine the uptake of their previous extortionate plans didn't stem losses. I'm certain that they've a long way to go to repair goodwill. I'm pretty sure they no longer have anywhere near 100 million users.

News item from May 2018: https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2018/05/17/photobucket-drops-pricing-that-angered-millions.html

Photobucket's current pricing structure: http://photobucket.com/plans/

To add to the above.

I've also just discovered that there is still a free, ad supported, plan on Photobucket. It offers 2GB of storage to new subscribers. And you can hotlink and embed from it, with Photobucket adding a watermark.

And, it appears that legacy users have the free storage and terms they agreed to at original signup. I have 18GB available and can go ad free for $0.99.  Whilst I downloaded copies of all my content from Photobucket back in 2017, I didn't delete anything from there, nor close my account. It was just left dormant.

Maybe, despite what I said in the previous post, I will give them a second chance. It seems that they have, without any fanfare, or even notification, reverted legacy users to their original terms. It's possible that they did email me back in May to tell me my legacy account terms were reactivated, but after the disruptive changes in 2017 I turned off my communication preferences and marked Photobucket emails as spam. I rarely check spam folders and I can't look back more than 90 days.

So, let's upload a random image and embed here...

... Nope. Nothing doing. Mods, would there be anything this end that is preventing a Photobucket embed?

Ahh, I see what's going on.

There's appears to be a script in place that converts Photobucket links on this website to point toward an admin's personal photo hosting website. Obviously that will only work for the legacy images the admin team repaired back in 2017.

I suppose unpicking that to re-introduce embedding from Photobucket for new images is likely to be another headache.

I may have accepted a bit of goodwill from Photobucket for reverting my account. Whether the admins are prepared to as well...

... once bitten.


Edited to add:

I have tried embedding a newly Photobucket hosted image on another forum. The new watermarking and hotlinking does indeed work from a free account.

(https://preview.ibb.co/b4ykaA/IMG-20181106-095722.png)
(screenshot hosted on imgbb.com)

Don't worry. I haven't left that rather confusing post up on WNXX! Replaced with a 'posted in error' message.

Now, were there to be a fix here I may compile a new multi image picture quiz by trawling the archives. ;)

Yep, that's some scripting I put in place to re-instate the integrity of all your old posts ... with your blessing as I recall  ;D ;D


Potentially a bigger headache than the original fix, I fear!


Tempting ... but I've not got buckets of spare time to do and to test this.

The whole "embedded images" thing is a bit of a nightmare.  I would prefer that images used in posts on the Coffee Shop were hosted on the same (our) server.  That would help ensure ongoing stability and compatability between the various elements in a post.

To some extent, the "attachment" capability provides the ability for members to add documents, graphics, etc, to their posts ... and over the years I've had to keep coming back and increasing the disc space available for attachments.  However - cares is needed and space costs money; much less than it did, but money never the less.

Noting
And Flickr, PhotoBucket, and so many other startups tempting users in and then having to generate income - be that from advertising or subscriptions.  And I can sympathise with their need to recoup the costs of massive storage - one of several reasons I've fought shy of providing image hosting.

The general question is back on the table (has it ever been off) ... To be looked at over Christmas and as we go forward; there many well be a hosting solution where images we host are only available within posts on the forum, but it's not good use of my time to put a general solution in to the current software versions.

I will take a look at the script for BNM ... and send a personal message when I've worked out how easy it would be.  That's a promise to look and inform, and not a promise to make any changes should they prove hard to do, be potentially unreliable, or introduce other problems.    But I would like a quiz  ;D

It's interesting to note that neither Flickr nor Photobucket changed their funding/pricing models because they were struggling startups. Their problems both stem from being swallowed up by larger companies and then spat back out.

Photobucket was purchased by Fox Interactive (part of the Murdoch empire) for $300 million in 2007. They sold it on in 2009 for $60 million to a company that was looking at the user base numbers and considering turning Photobucket into a social media site. That plan never came to anything but probably swallowed a good chunk of money.

Flickr was purchased by Yahoo! in 2005 for around $25 million. Yahoo asset stripped rather than invest. It was also more interested in targeting the user base to tempt them with other Yahoo! services. Yahoo! was acquired by Verizon in 2016. Almost immediately they started cutting costs and it seemed likely Flickr would be closed down. Instead Verizon has been breaking up Yahoo! and selling bits off. Flickr was acquired by fellow hosting site SmugMug earlier this year.

It certainly not startup costs being recouped by terms/pricing changes. The original folk at the helm of Photobucket and Flickr have ridden off into the sunset with the money thrown at them by the multinational corporations. It is those corporations who have damaged the revenue metrics of these sites. Its not the users who should be blamed for using the sites within the terms agreed at signup. We are advertised at after all. I don't doubt that storage of petabytes of data is expensive, but plenty of websites manage to cover the cost without gouging users like Photobucket attempted to do. At least SmugMug have been much more reasonable in changing the terms/pricing at Flickr.

Testing again. Can you sea the seegull folks?


(http://i598.photobucket.com/albums/tt68/bignosemac/rps20181106_095137_zpsb4k1hcyi.jpg)

Go on, why not try and guess the location. A taster for a forthcoming  bumper bignosemac picture quiz, now that I can embed once again from my Photobucket. I'll be trawling the archives in the coming days!

Public thanks to grahame for doing some black magic behind the scenes to revert hotlinks to my Photobucket. It appears that all legacy embedded images of mine are back to their original links. Only difference being the watermark.

Go one ... I'll hazard a guess ... Polperro

Glad to report I can see you seagull BNM but don’t have a clue where it’s residing.

Forgive Me Taunton?.

Sorry, no.

That would be unforgiveable for a single entry. Sorry, no. :D

"I see no chips!"

Oh, sorry - thought this was a caption competition  :D  As to location, no idea!

My gull's cleverer than yours   ;D

(http://www.mbob.co.uk/rforum/gull.jpg)

No idea where yours is bobm.

A clue to the location of my seagull.

Picture taken a few yards from a station, opened at Easter, 1890.

Oh yes ... I think I have it.  I thinks that's a station that wasn't grouped into one of the big 4 in 1923?

It wasn't. Neither was the only other station on the line.

Yes - I think I have it. It's where blue birds came out of during World War II. We could be into some dreadful puns here!

Care to actually name the place then grahame? Just deciphered your cryptic answer above. 😜

I'll have a proper railway locations quiz up tomorrow or Saturday. I've been busy cataloguing my digital imagery (around 6000 photos) and have found a few railway good 'uns. Brought back memories of railway locations that' I'd forgotten I'd even visited!

Lynmouth

Correct! Nearby station being, of course, the bottom station of the Lynton & Lynmouth Cliff Railway. Opened Easter 1890.

Can I have a go, please? Any guesses as to location.

(https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4912/45786339341_db19d3b3e8_c.jpg)

FT, N!
(Five Terns, Now!)

They look like Canadian Gulls to me ... Lake Ontario?

Spot on! Kingston, to be exact, with Wolfe Island in the background.

OK - I'm gullible, so my tern. I avocet for you to identify.

(https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1erIENv7Uw3sbekVWEYU3NvpKqjsWPP5Y)

I thought I spotted a clue with "avocet" but I've Googled pics of all the stops on the Avocet line to no avail.

Close(ish) - think of somewhere currently newsworthy along the extended route of avocet line trains.

After due consideration with my sibling, the Walker Brothers suggest the Dawlish environs.

No one's correctly guessed this one yet. I know where tiz, as bobm told me off forum.

It would help if the background buildings were in focus.

In somewhat calmer conditions than currently  ;D
(https://drive.google.com/uc?id=14URFudriw9RWvZ59gcDfmRfEn0znUMO0)

I resisted the wild card of Severn/Severed Beach earlier due the colour of the sea.

From my inbox this morning



My reply:


I will keep an eye on this / help as much as is practical if it does not sort soon.   With third party image hosting, the Coffee Shop team is limited in what it can do - sometimes treat the symptoms, but harder to cure a disease!

Website down. App not working. No replies as yet to email or social media queries. Keeping fingers crossed, particularly after I've just paid for an ad free/watermark free plan...

 ::) ::) ::)

Image links appear to be working again.

Someone over at Photobucket HQ has put 50p in the meter.

Phew!

And kept the rest of what you paid him.