The Camaro Club (UK)

Not sure how many have heard the news, but about a week ago Photobucket decided with minimal warning to start charging uses an extortionate $399 per year to be able to store photos and share them on websites. This has meant that an uncountable amount of websites globally have been affected, including the likes of ebay and amazon (and our club of course). It's highly unlikely anyone will pay that amount, resulting in thousands (likely tens of thousands) of forums losing most of the images. This certainly is a big blow to communities as it means topics in forums with how to guides / pictures from events etc. no longer have images and it depends on individual users downloading their images and editing all of those posts to get the images back, which is a highly unlikely thing to happen.

For our site, we do have the ability to upload images directly to this site (there's a filesize limit of about 3mb per image to help with storage capacity and also help pages load in a reasonable amount of time). No doubt, some (including my own project) threads are now mostly useless without images

There are talks of class action lawsuits as effectively users are being held to ransom and are being asked to pay disproportionate amounts (that recent virus that hit the globe (wannacry) was only a $300 one off ransom). Perhaps the courts will decide that they need to honor existing users / charge reasonable amounts and at least the old posts will come back to life. Will be an interesting thing to watch...

_________________
How to post pics: When writing a message, scroll down and use the "attach file" option. Where possible, a photo sharing service can be used such as Flickr, Imgur etc. The image location (usually ending in .jpg) can be copy and pasted between the ][ brackets that appear when you click the 'Img' button (you can find this button at the top of the message box).

How to post youtube vids: Click on the 'youtubeHD' button at the top of the message box and in the middle of the ][ brackets that just appeared, copy and paste everything from the youtube web address that appears after the = sign i.e if this is the url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2cNqaPSHv0 just copy "K2cNqaPSHv0").

They emailed me to tell me to upgrade......

They told me they have millions of users so why shoot for such a high fee ?

I would be willing to pay a reasonable sum but not a fricken mortgage fee...

Some sites have their own gallery like this one,
http://www.hotrodders.com/
and it´s more user friendly than that on Rods ´n Sods.

Ye they said in an interview recently that they have already doubled their revenue on just a small amount of people that have taken up their "generous" offer. So why charge so much when you have 40 million users. Could charge £1 a year and you have the potential to make £40mill per year. Turns out they only have 20 staff! Or even provide some level of loyalty discount for long term users and / or users with low usage.

Some alternatives to use would be Imgur and Flickr.

Will look into adding some type of gallery to this site. There aren't any off the shelf add ins for the forum software, as the developers ironically avoid it due to there being sites out there like photobucket. So perhaps this will change things and some new photo sharing / gallery type things will be built that can be added in.

_________________
How to post pics: When writing a message, scroll down and use the "attach file" option. Where possible, a photo sharing service can be used such as Flickr, Imgur etc. The image location (usually ending in .jpg) can be copy and pasted between the ][ brackets that appear when you click the 'Img' button (you can find this button at the top of the message box).

How to post youtube vids: Click on the 'youtubeHD' button at the top of the message box and in the middle of the ][ brackets that just appeared, copy and paste everything from the youtube web address that appears after the = sign i.e if this is the url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2cNqaPSHv0 just copy "K2cNqaPSHv0").

Greed it be.....greed.

Yep, all my images on this forum and many others will be affected come the end of my current paid subscription.

Across the web my build threads of various cars/bike have getting on for 500k views... all will be worthless.

But I can't afford to pay them $400 - and nor will I let them hold my images to ransom. Trouble is I don't have time to edit every post to link the images back to new hosting either. No win situation

_________________
My '80 progress thread - hugger orange! Now with LQ9 power - forged pistons, LS2 rods, 236/242, .621/.612, flowed and milled 317 heads. MS3X

4L80e, 12 bolt, 4.11, Moroso brute strength posi, steel shafts.

Subframe connectors, g-braces, solid body bushes, carbon hood and front bumper, custom door cards, Autometer gauges.

When I get the time I delete images from Photophucket and consider all my previous posts wasted.

Another email today asking me to update, in it they say......

"the Company amassed over 100 million registered users".......sheee it...

I haven't had the privilege of another email yet. With such a large userbase, they should be pulling in a decent amount of revenue through ads, plus they've already had paid subscriptions in place. It would be interesting to get hold of their financials, especially as they have so few staff. Server and host costs are very low these days compared to the high volume of data they process (increased storage capacity + more energy efficient products). I would take a guess that they could have introduced scaled pricing at lower costs and still brought in pretty good revenue. But as mentioned earlier - greed.

I was thinking about creating some kind of script that would run on a forum, and pickup photobucket links in posts and replace them with a different URL, but it would mean the filename of the pic would need to stay the same. As Flakmonkey mentioned, this may not work though, as it relies on the new provider keeping the original filename intact (some providers create a scrambled filename meaning it won't work).

Thinking about another type of script that would scrape together a list of all images within this forum that are on photobucket, download them, to this sites storage, then replace all the links in the posts with a link to the image on this site. The implementation is a bit above my knowledge level but I'll attempt to give it a shot.

_________________
How to post pics: When writing a message, scroll down and use the "attach file" option. Where possible, a photo sharing service can be used such as Flickr, Imgur etc. The image location (usually ending in .jpg) can be copy and pasted between the ][ brackets that appear when you click the 'Img' button (you can find this button at the top of the message box).

How to post youtube vids: Click on the 'youtubeHD' button at the top of the message box and in the middle of the ][ brackets that just appeared, copy and paste everything from the youtube web address that appears after the = sign i.e if this is the url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2cNqaPSHv0 just copy "K2cNqaPSHv0").

greedy bastids.... is all it is...

_________________
“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”