OT: Photobucket

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Been using this free for some years. A bit of a PITA to use, but free. Mainly as a host for pics I want to show elsewhere. Like on say my car club forum. You just provide the link on there and the pic appears in the forum posting. But isn't actually recorded to the forum server. PB calls it third party hosting.

They've said that due to people avoiding reading ads on their site, they no longer get a viable income from them to pay for things. So now want 300 dollars a year to use this facility. (Before, you could go ad free for a few quid - so not quite sure where they get this figure from)

[tim...]

It's so full of flipping ads it's unusable

when will they learn that "less is more"

tim

[Bob Minchin]

It is 3rd party hosting they are objecting to and asking for 399USD to unblock members photos.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I don't get any ads at all here. Various blockers in Firefox. So feel a bit guilty. ;-)

Thing is any 'free' service like this has to be paid for in some way.

[Bob Minchin]

I agree but $399 per annum is a real "f*ck off" price.

There are several other free services and those are bound to be inundated with new applicants who need third party hosting for forums (cloud services and forums don't usually work) These are either going to have to charge to pay for the extra storage and bandwidth or block 3rd party hosting. Personal webspace is probably an affordable alternative at a few dollars per month and you remain in control.

[Andy Burns]

Hosting files for web access in Amazon S3 costs pennies for any reasonable sized file and reasonable number of downloads. No adverts, no banners urging people to sign-in, no prompting to use a mobile app, no artificial delays before downloads start.

1.7p per GB per month for storage 0.3p per 10,000 views 7p per GB for data transfer [31p per million DNS queries if you want to use your own domain name in the URLs]

You get free usage (within limits) for 12 months and even some free transfers per month after that.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I know. In their email, they said it was because of falling revenue from ads. But up until now you could pay to go ad free for a few quid. Not 300 odd a year.

It looks like they want to close it down.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

But will it allow the 3rd party hosting? The only real reason I use Photobucket.

[Richard]

As you're a BT broadband customer, why not just use the BT cloud? Link to a cat pic.

Oh, you won't see this unless someone else replies.

[Andy Burns]

Yes.

e.g a file from my website that uses domain->bucket redirection

is just as easily accessible direct from S3

[michael adams]

If only that were true, as you finally run out of money.

It seems rather than being grateful to the site for having hosted their photos for 14 years for free, all that goes out of the window as soon as the revenue model no longer works, and they're greedy bastards all of a sudden.

The fact that they may have been greedy bastards all along is immaterial. Beggars can't be chosers, and there's no such thing as a free lunch. The fact that so many people think these things no longer apply online, usually put down to the assumption that software writes itself nowadays, and that server time and storage are so cheap, doesn't make it true. Or false. Whatever.

michael adams

...

[Brian Gaff]

I'm not particularly surprised a similar thing has occurred to dropbox already. Now you can still share files but you cannot use it as cloud storage for pitures on a web site without using the paid service. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

The problem is that advertising has lost its value now so many people do it and so many block it. Some free tv sites now stipulateyou allow adverts before they will let you log in. Its not so bad for you sighted folk but often adverts on web sitees madke anotherwise accessible site totally inaccessible as the advert providors do not care if their items screw up access or not. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

Would that work for others though? I'd have thought they really should have just appended a random ad to each demand to their server for a picture.

Brian

[John Rumm]

Yup they seem to be counting on their bait and switch working since they figure many people will not want to go edit potentially thousands of forum posts to direct image links to a new host. They have set the price so high however I can't see many being prepared to pay up.

[John Rumm]

Is that an old Archive Viper QIC drive on the left?

[Andrew May]

I get:

Error

Opera Browser detected

/!\ BT Cloud is not optimised to run on Opera. Please use an alternative browser.

FFS. I thought that shenanigans went out with the ark. Remember the 'best views in IE' monikers.

[michael adams]

But as you can't use any of them in any case, as I doubt they accept postal orders, where's the joy for you ?

michael adams

...

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Nor can I. Or anyone else I know. Our car club forum - which is already effected by all the pics being replaced by a caption - is likely to suffer. It already has a Facebook page - and that doesn't require third party hosting for pics (you can upload your own from your computer) and I'd not like that to take over as I prefer the forum format.

[whisky-dave]

The thing about facebook is they claim the right to reproduce your picture and use it for their own uses. I'm not sure if that means they can then claim ownwership or how that effects copyright.