Would someone look at one of my threads and let me know if my pictures are still showing up.
Thanks.
Looks like it.
Thanks Scott…
I use PB, and yahoo for email. I as p.s. today have not had a ransom notice from them. But it may happen soon…
@badcatt, the photos on that post are hosted by staticflickr, not Photobucket. Only Photobucket images are affected (so far).
I had this happen to me with “imageshack” - which is where I used to upload all my pics for sharing on forums. It was free for the longest time, but at one point they decided they wanted to start charging, and any existing images would be blocked / deleted if I didn’t pay up.
The majority of my Cougar project thread had images hosted there… probably a couple hundred or more! So I ended up switching to Flickr, which is great and free. The bad news is I had to manually edit all the image URL’s in my thread and it took forever. Major PITA. So I did it in batches and all has been well since then. Hopefully they will stay free. FYI Flickr is a Yahoo site.
Sounds like Jay is doing a great job migrating everything! Thanks for your efforts guys. Sounds like moving forward everyone will have to either use the attachments feature here or find another place to host.
I’ve finished fixing all the Photobucket images that aren’t blocked or 404’d (file not found).
If you want to know if your account at Photobucket is one that couldn’t be fixed or had missing images, first log on to your Photobucket account and look at the URL in the address bar of your browser. Your account number is the subdomain of the URL; e.g., the “XXXX” in:
http://XXXX.photobucket.com
The subdomain/account may be fewer or more than four characters. Next, look in the list below for your subdomain/account number. If your subdomain/account number is in the list, your Photobucket account was either blocked, or images that you’ve posted on the Forum were missing from your account.
Note: Some users are reporting that the URL for their Photobucket accounts starts with an “s” instead of an “i” whereas the actual links to their images, where I got the accounts, uses an “i”. That means when you check the list below, you may find that your account is listed with a leading “i” rather than the leading “s” that you see on Photobucket.
i66
s797
i123
i43
i763
i717
i847
i44
i282
i1093
i56
i1122
i680
i951
s847
i182
i1191
i173
i21
i797
img
i52
i636
i1151
i632
i621
i240
i1256
i50
i1086
i1342
i25
i88
emob1086
i176
i566
i32
i48
i42
i65
s1194
i1123
i857
i220
i1050
i690
i28
i733
i1133
i157
i30
i856
i1132
i237
i353
i116
i175
i1359
i191
i1194
i11
i168
i1196
i17
i319
i33
i67
i179
i1130
It looks like a lot, but to put it in perspective, we went from 3,974 posts including Photobucket images down to 658.
I recommend using Supermotors for your photo hosting. Free, easy, no popup ads like Photobucket.
The downside of any external photo hosting service is that it may also go the way of Photobucket and the others that have begun charging for or eliminated third-party display of images. It may be years, but as this thing with Photobucket has demonstrated, it can be a real PITA. The other thing I notice with Supermotors is that they aren’t using HTTPS.
Great Job Jay and Thank You. Now a question, it look like Bill’s post a few days ago stated that from now on we should post our pictures to the CCC.com webpage. Did I get that right? If so, is there room for the large pic files or are we reducing size, etc.
Also, again if I am reading correctly, with the exception of some people that got blocked, all of our pictures were downloaded and are now stored on a local computer for the site to access? Here again, did I read that right?
If I am correct I may just close my PB account.
Please enlighten me.
Thank Again For Your Work!
Gary Hill
Yes, you can use the image attachment feature of the Forum to post your images. I think if you don’t, and use one of the remaining free image-hosting services, you’re just running the risk of running into the same problem we’re having now with Photobucket. The Forum software has very limited ability to resize and optimize images, so it’s definitely best if you do so before you attach them to a post. I’m looking at ways to improve the way the Forum handles attachments. If you resize the images to a width of 800 pixels, that’s the size the Forum allows. If you want to really optimize them, the settings you would use with a photo editor like GIMP or Photoshop would be:
quality: 85%
optimize
progressive
subsampling: 4:2:0
DCT method: integer
save EXIF data: no
Or, if you’re using Imagemagick:
-resize 800x -strip -interlace Plane -sampling-factor 4:2:0 -quality 85%
I realize that doing that is over the heads of some users; that’s why I’m trying to find a way to build it in to the Forum.
If your Photobucket account isn’t listed above, then your images were imported to the server and you’re in good shape. Note that for some reason, some Photobucket accounts have been redirected to “s” instead of “i” in the subdomain, despite the image links here still being listed as “i”, so if you look through the list you may see your account listed with an “i” whereas on Photobucket it shows up with an “s” prefix.
I don’t recommend closing your Photobucket account if you have a free account. You may be hosting images at sites other than CCC, and if your account isn’t blocked, they’ll still be appearing there.
Thanks Jay. Meanwhile, they got to me and sent the email today. I guess they heard me talking about them.
Photobucket got to me as well. Some of my photos were disabled because of 3rd party hosting. I’ve started the process of removing my albums from their site. It’s a slow process but I figured I better do it before everything gets blocked or held for ransom.
Steven
If your Photobucket account is listed above as one of the blocked ones, and you want to fix the blocked images on CCC, you can give me your Photobucket account/subdomain, and I can give you a list of all the images used here on CCC. It will include the album names in the URLs. Once you have downloaded those albums, if you put them somewhere I can get them like Dropbox or Google Drive, I can fix process them and fix your images on the CCC site.
Hey Jay, while you’re making improvements to the attachments feature, do you think we could get more than 3 attachments per post? Like, say… 10?
Done.
10 was the number over at the other site. It was unlimited here at one point, wasn’t it? That is my recollection.
Unlimited would be cool too, but probably impractical. 10 seems much more workable than 3 anyway. Thank you!
I don’t remember if it has ever been unlimited here. Setting it to “unlimited” makes me feel a little uneasy since we do occasionally still get spammers. People had to make mulitple posts before to include more than three images, which uses more resources than putting all the images in a single post, so it makes sense to increase it to something you as a community feel is practical. Why don’t you give 10 a try for a while, and if there are issues with it, let us know.
I kill a spam account about once a week, so far two this past week. They seem to know enough to answer our Cougar quiz questions… Yet I still get at least one legitimate person a week that can’t tell us how many lug nuts are on a Cougar wheel. It is all about finding the balance.
I was just saying because I distinctly remember that here I could include more than on the other site. No complaint whatever has been decided!