Photobucket & Third Party Hosting.

[Pete W.]

Hi there, all,

I recently received an email from Photobucket advising me that third party hosting from my account had been disabled.  The message stated that to restore third party hosting I would have to sign up for a higher grade of membership.  On investigation, I discovered that there are four grades of membership of which only the top grade supports third party hosting.

The subscription for that grade of membership is listed at $39.99 per month.  There is no way I can afford that subscription.

The consequence of this is that all the photographs on my early Mad Modders posts have been replaced by a Photobucket window announcing that the photo is no longer hosted.  A further consequence is that there are many of my posts, occupying Mad Modders server storage, which are meaningless without the photos.

I apologise for this situation, both to the Mad Modders management and to individual Modders.

I do feel a bit peeved that this situation has arisen since I do not remember Photobucket offering me any sort of tariff choice when I signed up with them.  I realise that if a hundred Modders opened one of my threads (well, I can dream, can't I?!?!) at more or less the same time, there would have been a lot of bandwidth occupied, all of which has a cost.  I currently have an ad-blocker on my browser and I have received messages from other sites asking me to switch it off because they are funded by their advertising but Photobucket have never sent me such a message.

In recent posts, I have embedded my photos in the post rather than linking to them on the Photobucket site but that costs Mad Modders' server storage capacity.

What experiences do other Modders have in this respect?  Is this old news to any/most of you?   

[mattinker]

I received the same thing, very disappointed!

[vtsteam]

That's odd, I have hundreds of photos on Photobucket, and I haven't received any messages about my account. All photos still show here on the forum.

Do you guys have some particular kind of account, or do you have lots of storage there? Large photos? My storage shows 6% full.

I sure hope they don't shut mine down......

[Stilldrillin]

Over on the steam toy forum, lots of the members have received the same notification.....

My pics are still showing. But, not for much longer, I fear....... 

$400 rental!! That's never going to work...... 

David.

[awemawson]

All the more reason to put the pictures on the forum, not externally.

OK it's my hobby horse, but I'm right am I not 

[Stilldrillin]

All the more reason to put the pictures on the forum, not externally.

OK it's my hobby horse, but I'm right am I not 

It's a little bit late, for many millions of forum posts.......

[vtsteam]

From the looks of the message on your old posts, Pete, my guess is that your allowable storage capacity was exceeded (the 100% figure shown) . Is it possible that you stored full size photos on PBucket early on and reached a recently imposed max file storage limit?

If so, you should be able to go back and reduce those photo sizes and regain space, and get back down to free hosting with them. (also, videos are particularly big storage items, if you have any.)

As a guess Pbucket may have imposed a new lower limit as a policy, recently -- which would explain why so many users have got this message all at once.

Dunno, I'll wait and see what happens to my account with its 6% of storage capacity.

[Stilldrillin]

Steve.
They are charging $399/ ann. for the ability to, show your pics on forums. (Third party hosting)......



We have noticed that you have been using Photobucket for 3rd party hosting. Our Terms of Service does not allow 3rd party hosting for your current account level. Your account has been restricted since you have used 100% of your linking bandwidth.

In order to continue using Photobucket to host your images, please upgrade to a Plus 500 plan. Our Plus 500 Plan Includes: ad free browsing, full resolution photo storage, 3rd party hosting & priority customer support.

Please note that your bandwidth limit is not related to your photo storage limit - they are two different things. Your storage limit is related to how many images/videos you're uploading to Photobucket.com. Your bandwidth limit gauges how many times someone has viewed your image.

[vtsteam]

Okay, well I guess I'll download my pics and revise all my posts here to include a new link. That should keep me busy.......

[fcheslop]

Just found out Iv the same problem on a model boat forum and theyve disabled all the links to A V twin steam plant build
Guess it a sign of corporate greed. But to ransom people is so wrong
cheers
frazer

[efrench]

It could be they are only targeting people running ad blockers.  I checked several of my older posts and the images were showing and I could view them on photobucket (after waiting for all their ads to load).

[vtsteam]

I run ad blockers, and so far all my photos are still up. But I'm taking measures to get off PB anyway. Downloaded most of my albums already.

[gerritv]

You could of course also get your own domain name, find an affordable web host and host the photos yourself. Lots of benefits including not having email address tied to a vendor. Gives you freedom to shop for affordable internet as well.

I host all my stuff in Ontario with a .ca domain name. Gives me some distance from the DMCA and its ilk as well as intrusive packet inspection etc. My ISP rents wire from a local cable company so I don't get gouged on that either.

But as Awemason says, best option is to resize your photos and host them on the forum. There is nothing more hateful than finding great posts/information but the photo links are dead. Yes it is 'nice' to have the photos interleaved with the post but not worth the risk of dead links.

Gerrit

[DMIOM]

.....In recent posts, I have embedded my photos in the post rather than linking to them on the Photobucket site but that costs Mad Modders' server storage capacity.......

Folks,

I'm writing this from my own personal perspective and in no way on behalf of our hosts, Eric and Victoria - but it is prompted by my regard for what they keep running for us (with contributions from some viewers).

Please remember :
1/ It costs to host the forum and images take much more space than text; if you keep images down to the generally acceptable 800 x 600 it will be less space.
2/ Would like to encourage those who can to make a donation towards the costs Eric & Victoria incur running MadModders.

Dave (IOM)

[Pete W.]

Hi there, all,

Thank you to all who have responded, I'm staggered to see how many posts have been added overnight!

Steve, when I logged on to Photobucket yesterday it said I was at 2% capacity (that's for the free grade of membership) and I've always resized my photos to 640 x 480 before uploading them to PB.  I've never posted videos.

As I said in my opening post, Photobucket have never sent me any messages concerning my running an ad blocker.

I haven't checked but how far in the past does the Mad Modders site permit amendments to historic posts? 

[AdeV]

A possible solution

I recently set up a Coppermine album for another forum on which I am admin. Coppermine is free software, and although it's a bit clunky compared to the slick offerings from Photobucket, Flickr, etc., it has the advantage that it's not controlled by some mega corporation.

These days, online hosting is available pretty cheaply. e.g. I have a Linode server, which costs $20/month, which hosts all of my e-mail, 2 forums, the coppermine gallery, and an instance of Nextcloud which I use to store files for myself. There's still a fair amount of disk space free, albeit probably not enough to sensibly host a gallery for a forum as popular as this one...

My proposal is this: If 3-5 of us could get together to fund the hosting, I'd be happy to set up a coppermine gallery for the exclusive use of MM members, on a fresh server. If we start with the $20/mo offering from Linode, that will probably last for 3-4 years before it needs upgrading (and longer, if Linode lets us buy additional storage without changing the server).

The reason for having a few people looking after it:
 - It's not vulnerable to one person falling ill (or worse), or going offline,etc.
 - Better response times if a photo requires moderation, or if there's a problem with an account, etc.
 - If hosting funds run low, a collection of people are more likely to be able to top up any shortcoming without too much pain

I'd suggest setting up a paypal account to handle the hosting fees. A paypal a/c allows us to beg for donations from happy users to help defray the costs of hosting.

I presume Eric controls the madmodder.net domain, so it should be possible to add a DNS record to that to point to the gallery, thus binding the two sites together under one umbrella (e.g. photos.madmodder.net could be the address), which also reduces costs as we don't need a dedicated domain name.

If there's a general feeling that this is something people would be interested in, and I'd be particularly keen to get Eric's input, then getting it started is easy. I could put the thing together on Monday.

Any thoughts?

[awemawson]

And how long would it be before Coppermine, having become successful, gets sold to Photobucket and it all starts again?

IMHO better to help Eric fund the existing forum running costs, and encourage people to use the forum to store pictures, so we don't get all the 'missing picture' threads. They always seem to be the one worth keeping, yet they're lost 

[AdeV]

And how long would it be before Coppermine, having become successful, gets sold to Photobucket and it all starts again?

Coppermine is open source software Andrew - the worst that can happen to it is its developers give up on it....

[awemawson]

But wherever 'Coppermine' is hosted is subject to the same vagaries over time -  better that the forum owner also controls the forum data. Then at least they share the same future fate !

I say we should all in some way help fund Eric

[vtsteam]

Ade, I host a business account with webmasters.com (and have since 2002) and have had great service with zero complaints -- and that one is $9.95/mo. It's a high quality professional, hands-off outfit (unlike GoDaddy and the like) Just mentioning it to add to the mix here, of possible hosts.

Other observations:
I've been downloading my Photobucket albums in preparation for abandoning that ship. Interesting point....the downloads all originate from Google servers.

Thinking about what happened at PB, imagine YouTube going the same route.....

The next few years should be interesting with all the "cloud" dependencies people have made......

[vtsteam]

Andrew, I believe forum participants own the copyright to their content on responsible fora. I generally avoid those which attempt to co-opt that. I do think a cooperative joint hosting provider is a good idea, assuming users could add, or remove, photo content at will.

I also don't like the thumbnail presentation of forum software, and prefer to see images inline mixed with text. I think photo size should be limited to 800x 600max in forum software to reduce bandwidth and storage. Rather than than format being set by user option. An 800x600 image can be less than 100k in size. I have over 500 photos on Photobucket in various fora, yet PB reports I am using only 6% of my 2 Gig free allotment.

[gerritv]

AdeV, there is a possibly simpler solution:
SMF has an addon module that supports inline attachments. Could one of the Mods look into adding this functionality?

https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=525705.0

Has lots of options to control placement etc.

Gerrit

[awemawson]

I gave up with Photobucket quite some time ago when their user interface got more and more awkward.

[vtsteam]

Gerrit, the reason for thumbnails (and third party photo hosting) is it cuts down on bandwidth for the forum. Excessive bandwidth engenders much higher hosting costs.

Every time a visitor, user, spider, or bot opens a page, all the images or thumbs on that page download. Thumbnails are much smaller than full size images so the bandwidth is greatly reduced.

Third party photo hosting also has the advantage of eliminating the cost of local storage for images, so it is doubly cost effective for the forum. There is no storage cost and no bandwidth cost. Those are absorbed by the image host.

[AdeV]

Coppermine is just the picture hosting software.

I'd have absolutely zero problem if Eric wanted to host it; I offered Linode and a "consortium" idea because a) it works quite well with ModelEngineMaker, and b) it provides continuity even if MM changes hands, or otherwise changes.

I have no dog in this fight (to probably misquote and misuse the metaphor), just throwing an idea out there.

FYI the Linode $20/mo offering gives you 48GB of SSD (i.e. ****-off-a-shovel fast) disk space, 3TB/mo transfer (download IIRC, upload isn't metered), and they can automate your backups for a few dollars more as well.