Phuck-U Photobucket!

[Lokiel]

WARNING: DON'T PAY PHOTOBUCKET'S US$400 EXTORTION FEE! (you'll be throwing your money away, they wont be around much longer)

From https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/7/15/15973240/photobucket-hotlinking-im-the-sheriff-blue-whale-challenge:

Photobucket is locking down huge chunks of internet history
Photobucket, one of the internet’s most longstanding image repositories, recently shocked its users by quietly changing its terms of service without announcing that it would begin charging $400 per year to allow users to hotlink their images, preventing people from easily embedding the images they’ve uploaded to Photobucket on other websites. Though the term is nearly archaic now, in earlier internet times, when images were big and server load capacity was small, hotlinking was a big deal; Photobucket was among the crucial free web storage systems that allowed you to freely upload and share images wherever you liked.

The result is that the internet’s “Web 2.0” middle period — which began sometime around 2003, when Photobucket was founded, and ran through 2008 or so, when social media took off — was dominated by sites and blog posts built around Photobucket images. But now Photobucket has blocked these images from appearing, which effectively decimates the internet’s archive of those middle years.

The change at Photobucket comes just as SoundCloud has announced massive layoffs, reportedly telling staff that it currently only has enough money to stay in business another quarter. Though SoundCloud has insisted that it’s going to be fine for the long term and that its users’ data is safe, the warning has given everyone time to prepare for the worst-case scenario.

No matter the outcome, though, in concert with the Photobucket news, SoundCloud’s fate could pose another huge threat to longstanding, beloved internet archives — a stark reminder that while the internet may be forever, it’s only as permanent as the servers in which we trust.

- also, download your images now before it's too late and they're gone forever.

[JBT]

OK, so I sent my old sigpic that was linked from photobucket to imgur but when I try to link it in my signature I get this "It was not possible to determine the dimensions of the image. Please verify that the URL you entered is correct." I tried all the image links and get the same result.

Help please.

[JBT]

Nevermind, looks like Okibi sorted it out using pixeleculture.

[Lokiel]

I've just re-generated my original Garage thread, Lokiel's "Gina" (2004 Titanium SE), to Lokiel's "Gina" (re-generated), translating all PhuckU-Bucket images to their new host-site (see http://mx5cartalk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=75491)


This was a lot of effort and if anyone else wants to do the same because they use (or used to use) PhotoBucket, I can assist them.

Here's the steps:

1. PM me with the MX5CarTalk thread you want to re-create
2. I'll auto-generate a list of all the PhotoBucket images in that thread and send you a 2-column spreadsheet of the result (first column will be all the PhotoBucket image addresses in the thread, 2nd will be blank - more on this in the next 2 steps)

Do these 2 steps together:

3. Copy your PhotoBucket images to your new image-hosting site (I use postimages.org but imgur or flickr are other alternatives - unfortunately Google wont do 3rd-party hosting at this time)
4. Fill in the second column of the spreadsheet with corresponding new image address

5. e-mail me the updated spreadsheet
6. I'll run a Python script using this spreadsheet to generate a new text file that contains the new forum text and e-mail it back to you
7. Create your new thread
8. To populate the thread, manually create new posts and cut&paste sections of the text file into each new post.
* I cut&pasted multiple posts into single new posts because it was way too much effort to create a "1-for-1" posting
* I tried to group related sequential posts together (eg. responses to my modz)
* There is a limit to how much text can be pasted into a post so you can't simply put the entire file into a single post
* Curiously there's a "smilie limit" of 10 per post so sometimes you won't be able to combine as many posts into one as you'd like (in this thread there are quite a few short "smartarse smilie posts" in a row so I had to group these one-liners into several posts rather than one - all in good fun so keep it up)

Steps 3 ,4 and 8 do take time but it's worth doing to save your thread.

I had over 1,000 images in PhotoBucket

[Lokiel]

See manga_blue's http://mx5cartalk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=76374&sid=a2d4b2768b50e4d3d40b16310617863f PhotoBucket Image fix.

[Zekesil]

Hey dudes,
If you use google chrome as your browser, theres a hotlink patch you can download which fixes all the broken links
has made life 10 x easier

[ManiacLachy]

I had heard about these extensions, but I never looked into it. Your post finally motivated me, it only took 10 seconds and boom - pics!

Thanks.