Image Hosting Policy Change

[Xano]

Hi CS12,

For a long time, we have primarily disallowed local uploading of images due to the costs associated with hosting images ourselves.  However, with the recent revelation that Photobucket has decided to charge EACH USER an exorbitant fee of 399.00 a year to allow any non-photobucket website to display the images, we have revised our policy.

Going forward, all images should be uploaded locally.  If you must link to an external image host, please only do so for situations that don't need to withstand the test of time.  Lounge photos can still be externally hosted.  If posting in any of the technical forums or build forums, please try to upload your images instead of using an external host.  This will allow us to continue to host your images for years to come regardless of changes to the external image host's terms of use.

This does mean, however, that any image uploaded to our site will be licensed under the Creative Commons License (same as used on Wikipedia for images uploaded there). 

Also of note, I am working on finding a way to retrieve the broken images that are linked all throughout our forum.  Once I am able to get these downloaded, we will be uploading them to our site to host them.  If you have concerns over the downloading of and rehosting of your images, please let me know.  We would be happy to help you through the process of upgrading your Photobucket account and/or rehosting the images somewhere else that you have access to.

Thanks!
The Management.

[weitrhino]

I have local copies of the images I hosted on photobastard and intended to root through the library and host them elsewhere. With the new policy, and with the possibility of finding a way to bulk acquire the lost photos, should I just hold off on uploading and editing them into old posts? It's not like I was 'just about' to do this but it will be a time consuming task.

[Nebuchernezzer]

Awesome. I have recently downloaded all my photobucket to my localc machine too.

[Xano]

I have local copies of the images I hosted on photobastard and intended to root through the library and host them elsewhere. With the new policy, and with the possibility of finding a way to bulk acquire the lost photos, should I just hold off on uploading and editing them into old posts? It's not like I was 'just about' to do this but it will be a time consuming task.

If you were working on your own plan to rehost and update your old image links, feel free to continue. If you use the same filenames at your new image host we may even be able to automatically replace the image urls for you

[iceageg]

I have only posted a few images in my time here and I have them all.  I don't know if you can email a name/link to each of the images that were lost to each user who posted them in the past.  I could easily re-post valuable content for the site.  Silly shit like LoLcats and what not that are lost don't need to be fixed in my opinion.

In a semi-related note, do you paypal?

[Xano]

I could very easily compile a list of usernames, emails, and post links where a photobucket url was used.  I'll work on that and see about emailing them to the respective users.  Sounds like a good case for a SQL query followed by a powershell script to do the mass emailing.

[weitrhino]

..............Going forward, all images should be uploaded locally.  ........

I can't seem to find an option for actual uploading of images after attempting to do so today. Are we any further along on the path of reconstituting photos?

[weitrhino]

Bueller?

[Skeeter]

I added a Google Chrome Extension named 'Photobucket Embedded Image Fix' and it seems to be working well. Sometimes, you just need to reload the page to view FailBucket images.

[weitrhino]

I know that works but I use Safari

[Skeeter]

Well....use Chrome!

[Xano]

Havent forgotten about this, I just have had things come up that pushed this down my list.

[rednucleus]

Bump - Xano is it possible to post pics here yet?

[kelso840]

That'd be nice. Maybe we could source somebody from the more active FB group who's interested in taking role in site upgrades? Idk what Xano's spare time looks like.