ATTENTION! Photobucket is holding us hostage!

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Photobucket has changed their terms of service and now demands that we pay $399 a year to continue hosting the images that we use on this site. This means that pretty much every image used for the Ride of the Month as well as many of the tech articles will soon crash if we don’t pay up.

As most of you are aware, we don’t accept any advertising. There are no sources of income for the site except for the donations that come from the users. We are lucky if those donations total $300 a year, which is considerably less than the current site overhead expenses… This means another $400 is a big deal. I am not asking any one to donate more money, and we are not going to accept advertising. We are going to find a low cost solution.

Our plan is to find some other way to host the images and then see what can be done to migrate the links. That most likely will involve having to go into every single thread that contains and image and then editing the links to point to the new image location. I can not even begin to estimate the number of hours that will take.

Photobucket was free to us while it lasted, and we sent thousands of you to the site for your own use. Since they no longer allow any linking for free accounts you may find that you too are going to be stuck with making changes. They see what we are doing as "third party use and require us to purchase the most expensive plan they have. I suspect that their business is failing so they are making a last ditch effort to generate some cash.

I will try to keep every one updated as we move forward.

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Well, looks like it’s time to go back in to my PB account, and transfer all those images back onto the hard drive, dangit.

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The Terms of service render most accounts pretty much worthless.

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Having been through this “exercise” once with my ECI thread on MCnet, I have license to say: Fargin’ Iceholes!

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There are other free image-hosting services that still allow third-party image hosting, but I think what Photobucket is doing will happen to them all eventually, so using another probably is a short-term solution.

As an interim, kind of clunky workaround, you can right-click the blocked Photobucket image, choose “view image”, refresh your browser on the Photobucket site until the image is viewable, then go back to CCC. Your browser should have cached the image, and you will see the actual image instead of the blocked image.

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That really does suck and total BS for them to force the payment issue. Even if the forum had the money I wouldn’t support it based on principle. I am of course new around the cougar world and it seems CCC is still privately owned and operated(which i think is great!) vs the others selling their sole to verticalscope. Every forum I have been a part of that had sold to a company like this has gone downhill.

I have used photobucket for years and it was always pretty easy to use. I did however notice recently its indicated with ads to the point of making it a total pain to navigate on a desktop.

What is really going to suck is all the past threads that may have used them for hosting. It will kill all those links with great pictures of tech,builds etc. For me personally I rely heavy on those old threads for research on my current project

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I think the problem is bigger than you think, Bill. If I understand it right, there is nothing CCC.com can do… the users of photobucket must upgrade their account ($399 each) to be able to post their photos on other sites. See this: https://www.ghacks.net/2017/06/30/photobucket-now-charges-399-for-third-party-hosted-images/

Edit to add: By the way, most ISP’s give their users a limited amount of web hosting space that can be used to host pictures - if you are computer-literate enough to figure out how to do it.

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If you want an idea of the impact here, there are 3424 posts that include images linked from Photobucket. Of course, there may be more than one Photobucket image in a post…

The way I read it, every user who hosts images on other sites from a Photobucket account may be charged the fee in order for their images to show up on the third-party site, but it doesn’t look like every user here has been targeted; so far, it looks like just the CCC Photobucket account.

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You are correct Mr. Eos… This is a major issue.
My fondest hope is that they let individuals continue with free third party hosting capabilities.
My dream is that Face Book or Google will buy them and make it free again.

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I had not realized that you were subsidizing the site to that extent. I’d challenge all users to make an appropriate donation to at least cover the expenses and perhaps it can also cover the additional $ 400 for a temporary solution to the immediate problem.

XR7g428, could you let us know what the numbers are, including the number of users so we can get an idea of how much per person we need to contribute?

I suspect we have all benefited from the site and perhaps not realized we’ve been provided a free lunch for quite a while. Anyone up for the challenge?

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I don’t think it’s unreasonable for us to pay dues just like we would to a local or national club.
I’m sure we addicts - er - regulars - would be happy to divi up the expenses, even for PB if there isn’t
a viable altenative. Photo posting is vital to this endeavor.
($399 is $1.09/day.)

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I don’t know if it might help, but motortopia.com is a car site (mostly) and there has been no problem with pics

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I think we can avoid anything like dues. Jay has some ideas but at first blush if we take about 7 minutes per image currently hosted on PB it will take 188 hours to update everything with a new link. The key is to figure out how to migrate. This is a major disruption to literally hundreds of thousands of site. PB Claims to 100 million users and billions of images. As web masters figure this out they will share what they are doing and we will be paying attention. We are looking into our own virtual private server just to host images.

We have a bunch of different sites on a shared server so it is difficult to assign exact costs to this site. Jay and I are all volunteer labor so that helps. I really don’t want to know… LOL! My best guess is that it is something less than $100 a month so not that bad.

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I am going to be out of pocket for the next week visiting my in laws. Jay and I will be in communication as we figure this out.

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I have to finish packing, but THANK YOU! to the folks that have stepped up. It is greatly appreciated.

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Jay for the WIN!

Here is a synopsis of what Jay did to get us back in business:

He built an application on our server to retrieve a list of all the URLs used in the forums for a given Photobucket account. Then he got a ZIP file of all of the images we own. This file is too large to process on our server so he has to do this on a local computer with a lot more memory. These are big files! Then he wrote a script to basically re-write and reconfigure all of the file names, getting rid of the gibberish that Photobucket attached.

Photobucket made this pure hell. Every time I created a new ROTM I created a new album to store the images. I think that there were upwards of 50 albums… Each time we wanted to download an album, Jay had to manually enter the F’ed up reCAPTHCA. A major PITA.

The the images have to be resized to fit and all the other extraneous stuff removed. Then the files are compressed and stored on a special file on the local computer. Back on the CCC application the lists are compared and the new images are posted to a data table.

One cool by-product is that now that we are feeding the images from our own server you won’t see the “insecure site” notice in the address bar.

If this sounds easy, it was anything else but. Photobucket went down repeatedly blowing up the process and then changed the addresses of our images in the middle of the process. In the end we had to move some 444 files and about 43.7 MB.

So this took care of the images we put on the site, but what about your PB images? Never fear Jay is here!

There were 2987 remaining posts with PB images posted by users. When we started it appeared that none of those were being blocked.

Since the images were not yet being blocked, and still being displayed, it was not necessary to down load them directly. Jay wrote a script to find them and down load them then process them and store them on our site. So this solved most of the rest of the issues.

I have to mention that going forward you will want to load images directly onto the CCC site, and not use other hosting services. Chances are we will have this same issue in the future otherwise.

And the bad news… It looks like Jeff Speegle and Brian Aust have now been blocked. We can’t recover those images. To further complicate things, it looks like some of the images of Brian’s that I had duplicated and stored on my own personal PB account, have been removed from my PB account. My best guess is that some people finding that their accounts are blocked are setting up new accounts and moving images into new unblocked accounts as a work around. To keep them from doing it, it appears PB is blocking those images…

I case anyone was wondering, if this was not being done pro bono it would have run in the thousands of $$. We all owe Jay a huge debt of gratitude at the bare minimum! Way to go JAY!

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From a guy that just barely knows how to turn on a computer, I find that fantastic, Way to go JAY. Thanks for keeping us up and running.

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Thanks for all the work guys, I hate PB atm.
Uploading photos for my resto thread is such a drag with all the ads and rubbish popping up.

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Thanks Jay :beerchug: