As some of you may know, Photobucket has finally pulled the plug on the 'third party hosting' of images - letting anyone see images when a link has been posted, or embedded, in a forum or website. See this article for details.
Already, links have been broken for anyone who uses Photobucket's free service, and in place of their images there is just this.
This move is outrageous after 14 years of allowing 3rd party hosting free (although not really surprising), but they are also doing it for their paid-for accounts, except the plan that costs $400 a year, which will cotinue to allow subscribers to post links to their pics on forums etc. Maybe it'll be $500 this time next year?
Photobucket changed its terms with no notice, which is plain extortion! The internet will never be the same if they don't backtrack on this decision.
Unfortunately, my various vintage airgun galleries all use Photobucket links to images, with most of the pics hosted by me, but quite a few by others too. Links to LeonardJ's pics have already been broken.
So if Photobucket doesn't reverse this decision (it might do this as millions of account holders leave in disgust) then I will have to stump up $400 a year just to keep my 20,000+ gallery images alive.
So far, as a subscriber to the $20 odd a year plan, my links are still active, but this could change at any moment.
Very reluctantly I've had to add a Paypal donations button to each of my forums and I would appreciate it if collectables regulars could donate something.
I've never wanted money to be a part of my forums and I'm really sorry it's come to this. I could move all the images to another free hosting site, although this would take months of hard work and there's no guarantee Imgur, Flickr etc won't follow suit eventually.
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Originally Posted by Garvin
