Photobucket.....

[BYBBQ]

I keep hearing folks talk about fixing the broken links...But I don't know how that works...So mine stay broken I guess...

Basically you would have to go to each pic posted, delete the old pic and re-post the same pic again. All your pics will have a new link associated with them. It's a real PITA.

[Mark R]

I keep hearing folks talk about fixing the broken links...But I don't know how that works...So mine stay broken I guess...

Yea, I have a couple thousand pics there - not gonna happen.
Email, I haven't gotten an email ( unless it spamed)???
So far been left alone. But I reduced my pics, have a small footprint. Prolly going at it from large to small, bigger bang for the buck. They'll find me......

[barleypop]

I cancelled my account but it will take a long time to complete, I bet it would take seconds to charge my credit card. I'll just get my own site.

[Jailer]

Free ain't free anymore. They showed us that. As I have said, set up your own website and post your pics from there...

I cancelled my account but it will take a long time to complete, I bet it would take seconds to charge my credit card. I'll just get my own site.

http://www.smoked-meat.com/forum/sho...0&postcount=41

[dward51]

I'm beginning to wonder if that was not their plan for the start. Given the wide availability of "free" services on the Internet it stands to reason that the request for even a modest form of payment would cause an uproar amongst normal folks and calls for counter measures from the social justice warrior crowd. But if they came out with "Give us $400 a year or you can't 3rd party link your photos." then a couple weeks later say "Okay, we'll let you 3rd party link for only $60 a year" many folks will say 'Okay that's reasonable. We'll do that."

And it would be foolish to buy into that plan. And whats to stop them from jacking it up higher and higher.....

They have lost all credibility and trust with most people over this. No way I would ever give them a dime now. If they had been reasonable in the way it was handled and had reasonable tiers to start with, yes most of us would have paid. But their site has been crap for months and I have to force block most of their add junk from loading in my browser just to upload a photo. If you look at all the crap they try to load it will shock you. They are eating up 10 times the bandwidth on crap than the images take.

At one time I ran 6 commercial websites and 3 different forums, and I can pony up a leased server for about 1/4 of what the PB subscription is costing. That gives me a lot of other options and power as well. I just did not want to fool with it, but if the image hosting world is coming to this as a business model, I know what my answer is. Set up my own domain and keep on rocking ($100 a year and $70 a year to renew with retention discounts). Host my own image section in addition to whatever else I desired. And the beauty of my own domain is I can back it all up and move it to another service provider seamlessly if prices go up at one place.

I'll give them a week or two at PB before I jump ship and burn my account to the ground (ie, delete everything). If my images stay up, I'll leave it alone, but if they lock me down.... f'em.....

Edit.......

I'm pretty sure there is a hack around this. PB has to be looking at the info passed from the referring page that is calling for an image. Once that pattern is figured out, there is no reason a plugin for most BBS software could not be written that would mimic a call from a PB domain instead of a 3rd party link. It's all in the way cookies and referring URL info is passed behind the scenes. Actually a plugin could be written that would import all PB images to a local drive if the hosting URL had sufficient space to store them. And it would be less expensive for the site owner to expand online storage to handle that than it would for just the site owner to pony up $400 (much less all the other users). Mimic a PB call and suck down the images as a one time thing and done. All the links would be updated to the new location of that image (that would be included in the plugin). Sigh, I'm getting to old for this sort of stuff. I'm not the code ninja I once was.... But IT IS DOABLE.

[DDave]

And it would be foolish to buy into that plan.

Well, I never said it was a good plan. Or ethical. But I can see some bean counter proposing it to management.

And whats to stop them from jacking it up higher and higher.....

Economics. They can only raise the price up to the point that the market will bear. I doubt very seriously it will bear $399 annually. But if they make it the same price or less than the private hosting solution you describe then I'm sure many people will see that as a bargain if, as you say, you're looking at $170 a year.

And as Jim pointed out earlier the free users have no leverage. PB couldn't care less if free users delete all of their pics. It does not hurt them in the slightest. It just makes more of their storage and bandwidth available for the paid users.