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Photobucket went batshit insane.


Vae
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So for those of you who don't pay attention to Photobucket (which is probably like all of you considering the current year), the site was apparently bought by some dude in 2015. His aim was to make the site a profitable business.

http://www.denverpost.com/2017/07/16/photobucket-fee-hike/

You know, Photobucket.
A site that people had used entirely because they didn't want to pay for image hosting.

It's nothing new for an acquisition to try to push for revenue. That's not noteworthy or exciting.

However, they went about it in hilariously bad fashion.
All hotlinks from the site, now and in the past, have been replaced with this image:

rtfvggg.PNG.1dbfb9cb7c629e4efb6e5e41bc35fe4f.PNG

All of them.
The site has been around for 14 years.
It used to be the go-to for most people posting most images back in my day when I was still an angsty teen Vae. Back when your computer still made a phone static war cry when it connected to the internet.

Photobucket now prompts anyone who wants to enable hotlinking again, and fix their broken images, to pay for a plan upgrade.
How much is it?
400 fucking USD per year.

$400/yr for image hosting.
Something you can do on Imgur, Tumblr, and a number of other sites for free.

Additionally, some people have stated that they can't access their accounts at all, even to download their old images and migrate them to a new service, without being forced to pay.
They're greeted with this screen:

596f834960a9f_DFGQqz0XsAEC093.jpglarge.thumb.jpg.217c33a4e86b099e0ba56c8a8c201bfd.jpg

People have been blowing their Twitter the fuck up with "Fuck you"s and "Are you serious"es and "I'm just going to a different service."

It's nothing that affects me, since I haven't used PB since like 2006.
But still, how do you fuck up that bad at basic business sense?
An aging site, whose sole saving graces were that it was easy to use and free (for the most part), and you shoot the biggest draw to even bother with it right to death.

Either this guy is pulling tactics, and trying to kill PB as a competitor for his own lower-priced site and services,
or he needs to take elementary-school-level business classes.
You can't "kekeke" like a cartoon villain and hold shit for ransom that literally no one actually needs. When someone down the street is offering the same fucking thing, with a nicer newer coat of paint, for free.

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I am aware of this since i made an FA journal about this here.

https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/8312472/

Since i got an email since i used it to link back some of my art on a sketchbook thread they eliminated hotlinking which caused a lot of sites to break as well as holding accounts hostage. Fortunately for me that didn't happen to me since i only used hotlinking for my sketchbook thread. But others can't even get into their accounts.

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Admins of photobucket knew their service got outshadowed by better image hosting sites so I guess this is their last, desperate  scream for help before photobucket commits a suicide as users migrate elsewhere

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$400 dollars is extreeeeemely overcharged, that's the price of like two or three professional softwares to download, not access to your own account. They'd have more success making bank if they charged like $10 or something, I bet a few people would grumpily shell out some coins anyways.

I wouldnt be surprised if a couple clueless, desperate people did shell out that money. Seems like photobucket just made at least $400 more than it did before.

 

 

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1 hour ago, Vallium said:

I wouldnt be surprised if a couple clueless, desperate people did shell out that money. Seems like photobucket just made at least $400 more than it did before.

They said they "doubled [their] revenue" with this method, but considering how much Photobucket was probably making before, I can't imagine that initial figure is hard to overlap.

I imagine some of the desperate people are going to shell the money, grab all their things, and just take it to a new (and less insane) hosting service.
So what little spike in revenue they're having is going to end up plunging right into the fucking ground.

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Somehow, the image mechanic on another tiny forum I frequent seems to circumvent this, because the sketches I felt too unsure about putting on FA are still there. I'm guessing it has to do with how Vanilla handles image hosting?

(As to why they're there and not Imgur or something: My desktop is ancient and hates me.)

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this prompted me to login and see if I still had an account and if anything interesting was on it.

Turns out I have a grand total of five images there that all date back to ten years ago. Apparently I got sick of their shit even then.

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17 hours ago, Sidewalk Surfboard said:

Well that's fucking obnoxious.

There's a very old forum I go on, and images only really work if they're photobucket links.

RIP like 10 years of images. Now everything just pops up with "user posted image".

Like half of the photos on forums on the whole web that used photobucket are gone.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 7/24/2017 at 0:44 PM, Nova said:

Like half of the photos on forums on the whole web that used photobucket are gone.

 

The internet is broken entirely because of it. Since photobucket allowed 3rd party linking. And that holding photos hostage for bypassing the 2GB limit really shot themselves in the foot since that's really unacceptable.

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I always hated Photobucket. It never worked properly for me here in Germany. When I clicked their links I always just ended up on the frontpage or on some weird gallery page of that user. It sucked.

Personally, I love Flickr. As a free user you get 1TB, you get privacy settings, the album management is easy to use and sharing stuff is simple.

I can share as a tiny square

35854253956_6ebb8c9926_s.jpgTired Red Panda by Mathias Appel, auf Flickr

All the way up to full res (which the forum apparently doesn't like so here it is at 2048x1365...)

35854253956_7302b8eb51_k.jpgTired Red Panda by Mathias Appel, auf Flickr

And anything in between.

I have the pro subscription for like 5 bucks every three months so I can see statistics and where my photos are being used. Oh and infinite storage.
It's real neat.

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