AstroBoy Online Forums

Photobucket has just screwed over a lot of people. I checked through the Caption the Picture game thread, and most of the images in there are gone now. My thread with screenshots from the Little Astro Boy series are gone now too. I've dealt with Photobucket's shenanigans for a while now, but this pushed me to deactivate my account on there. Not dealing with their bullcrap any longer.

Here's an article that explains what's happening (please excuse the cuss word in the article title):

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/3 ... 9096373833

Figure I should share this here since many of you still use Photobucket to share images on ABO.

I use my free Weebly.com website account to share images. You can mark a page as not discoverable which means that you can't find it unless you know the exact URL. Then you can put your images on that page, and only the exact images whose URLs are specified can be reached by outsiders. Of course, you can also just leave the page of images open if you like.

Photobucket have been rubbish for a long time. They've always been hostile towards hotlinking, which is a strange position to take when you're hosting images on the Internet. $400 seems like suicide as a business model. Anyone with the professional requirements to pay that much might as well hire their own server. I'm surprised they haven't killed my forum signature.

I use imgur.com at the moment. They run a community-based approach (forums and awards and stuff) which seems easier to support with ads, and they're very hotlink friendly. Accounts are optional. They were born out of a need for image hosting on reddit so they've handled some insanely high load demands (150 million users per month).

That's the exact reason why I refrained from using third-party websites to host my images. So far, I have used my personal web server for that, and it costs roughly 0 per year. Well, it needs some work to be kept online, but I need it for many reasons anyway. And it doesn't even kill my bandwidth. It might if I posted on Facebook though.

No one is going to pay that hiked up price, what where they thinking? This will probably kill them, as people will go elsewhere.

Here's my tinfoil hat theory: Maybe this is their plan to get out of the business of image hosting. Come up with an excuse to kill off 99% of their customer base, then sell the remaining rich clients to another company. Simply shutting everything down might expose them to lawsuits from amateur businesses who host their pics there, or foolish users who don't have local copies (lots of amateur photographers lost all their work when megauploads was shut down).

Never used photobucket before, so I can't really comment. lol

That... sounds like a really bad idea on Photobucket's part. Were they even making money before this? Maybe they think that enough people will fork over the $400 that it'll be worth breaking the Internet. We'll see how that works out.

Also, I use Weebly for my posts. It's free, fairly easy to organize pictures, and like Tetsuwan Penguin said you can hide pages if you so desire.

Well that's disappointing. I used Photobucket for about six years and actively at it. Now with there being the option of free web hosting online, why bother with the site anymore?

Unless it removes this requirement, Photobucket is good as dead in my book.

It seems harder and harder to find image hosting sites lately, I know I have hopped between three in the last 5 years. What a shame.