photobucket users, no more hosting of pics... Options

[njccmd2002]

what are you guys using now.

looks like the death of many, many build threads..

and this site maybe...

[Langing]

I first posted this comment on Nial's buiild thread, to me a most impressive work and one that might stand as a poster-child for what genuine harm photobucket's change in policy has done to its users. It was when I checked back in with his thread that I discovered this disaster. So, I am late to the party.

What has happened is unbelievably sad when you consider that every participant has labored under the impression that our work was being constructed to last 'forever'. No one imagined that we were building our structure on a sand foundation. . .

Additional information on what is going on at photobucket is available at a website called --- downdetector.com.

A typical comment posted on downdetector.com:

Mary Anne Reid • 22 days ago

For those of you who have no clue what is going on with PB, they have disabled all 3rd party links unless you are willing to pay $400 a year. What that means: If you run a blog, forum, ebay, etc. page/website and you embed your pics via the 3rd party link option, they are no longer viewable. This has caused extreme outrage and everyone scrambling to attempt to download their albums to salvage their pictures to move to another photosharing website. Visit their Facebook page for more info.

That is one of a great number of comments from outraged customers of Photobucket. Later comments indicate that it may be too late to get images downloaded off their faltering site.

AS i SAID TO NIAL

Now, as to your (NIAL'S) images during the years you have been working on your project, no one would expect you to laboriously rebuild your 'build thread', so it looks as if we are all SOOL, unless someone was to do something to reverse Photobucket's actions, such as file a class action suit to get Photobucket to turn 3rd party links back on. It seems to me that what they have done either is illegal (extortion), or should be made illegal, because the hurt to all of us is quite difficult to absorb or understand. How can anyone continue using the Internet constructively if the very basis that underlies their efforts disappears? Sorry that it happened to your build in particular, Nial, because I have followed your work since almost day one, and found it truly inspirational.

Or maybe this (6GC) website owner could negotiate with Photobucket and come back to all of us to let us decide whether to pay whatever they may demand. At least this might give us an option for which the perceived pain was just dollars and not months of hard work most will just not expend the labor doing, and if they do not, this site may itself (along with Photobucket) fall into the bit bucket in the sky. In the future, maybe we could all sign up to pay some reasonable monthly fee so the website could handle the images and this could never happen again. No other photosharing website, including FB, comes with a guarantee that they would not ever do something like what Photobucket did. There is, on this website, amongst the chatter, some valuable information!!