OT: Photobucket

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

when will they learn that "less is more"

tim

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Yes.

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

is just as easily accessible direct from S3

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

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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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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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.

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.