Photobucket Restricts My (and Yours) rv.net Photos

I quit using Photobucket a couple of years ago. It became so infested with popups and ads, and generally so slow, that I looked elsewhere. I now use Google's 'Flickr' which is quite elegant (but has a bit of a learning curve), and 'Imgur'. I've never used Dropbox but understand that it is quite good.

BTW, it's probably not a good idea to count on any freebee online photo site to store all your photos. Your online pics should just be a supplement to a good backup system, like an external hard drive. Or a good quality 'pay for' service.

My pictures here, are now showing the same '500' msg ,

Time to leave, between here and HoFo
I have about 400 pictures on photo bucket

I just updated the photobucket pictures on one of my posts using imgur photos and I may do a few more threads.

Depending upon how many photos you have it's a time consuming and unrewarding process.

Thoughts:

1. What is the long term exposure to imgur wanting a paid account?

2. And other hosting sites to follow?

This takes me to the conclusion that the best long term solution for rv.net is to provide their own picture hosting.

To rv.net: The quality of this board just took a hit and you're exposed on future hits from other hosting sites. And even more important as the quality of rv.net slides down hill posters and viewers will go elsewhere. And then YOUR ADVERTISERS WILL FOLLOW.

A few months ago I noticed that images in my past RV.net posts all disappeared. I went to my photobucket account and could log on and see my albums, but no photos would show. I tried several computers and browsers with no luck.

After MONTHS of tech support repeatedly telling me how to reset a password, I got an email saying that all my photos were accidentally deleted in an "update' error.

I get some free service, for a while, but what is the point if all the photos are gone and the links are broken-by them?

Photobucket cut their own throat in my opinion. I have lot of photos there and the work of moving them might have got me to pay $5 a month. But $50/m? are you kidding me? The only explanation is they want to get rid of the free users and start fresh.

CA Traveler wrote:
Anyone want to take odds on rv.net finally waking up and support picture posting?

Anyone?

Are the odds somewhere between 0 and none?

CW/GS/etc already has websites and servers and bandwidth.

Put in some of their own advertisements, some sponsored stuff, and run it like a "real" board ;)

That's not a swipe at the forum, anyone who understands knows that is the business model for boards.

I hope they do, this is a great resource and it would be a real shame to see it whither out.

DiskDoctr wrote:
When I've mentioned this in the past, it's "flame city" but situations like the Photobucket fiasco has the possibility of rendering a large portion of this forum as useless, which could actually have a cascading failure of forums, of sorts.

Anyone want to take odds on rv.net finally waking up and support picture posting?

Anyone?

Are the odds somewhere between 0 and none?

DutchmanSport,

You've been hacked --- er locked. Welcome to the club. :S

jimh425 wrote:
There are a number of pictures that no longer show up. Good if you can see them, but rv.net and many other websites will be losing context without pictures in many posts if photobucket doesn't change their policy.

IMHO, forums like this one should carry their own weight and host or cache images like most other large forums.

When I've mentioned this in the past, it's "flame city" but situations like the Photobucket fiasco has the possibility of rendering a large portion of this forum as useless, which could actually have a cascading failure of forums, of sorts.

There are a number of pictures that no longer show up. Good if you can see them, but rv.net and many other websites will be losing context without pictures in many posts if photobucket doesn't change their policy.

Sure, you can use a different service going forward, but most of us can't retroactively fix every bit of content over the past decade or so.

No warning and no transition is pretty horrible. Kind of like Ransomware at this point for those who have a big investment. I don't.