I received this Email from Photobucket this morning:
WE NOTICED THAT YOU HAVE BEEN USING
PHOTOBUCKET FOR 3RD PARTY HOSTING
PLEASE UPGRADE TO A PLUS 500 PLAN.
Our Terms of Service does not allow 3rd party hosting with your current account level.[/c]
So what's a Plus 500 plan? Well, basically £300 a year!
And why is this an issue? Well, I've been using Photobucket to host photos for forum use (not just TAS) for over ten years now, as have many other TAS members. This change means that any photos in my historical TAS posts will soon disappear unless I start paying them.
Yes, the photos will still be there, but they will stop displaying on the forum for other people to see. So, for example
this old post about frost free taps (with 8000 hopefully useful views) is about to become basically useless.
Personally, I'm absolutely livid about this. Even if they had done it for new uploads, that would be fine, but since it's impossible for me to go back and edit everything to move the photos to somewhere else, this is basically a ransom demand. The thing is, Photobucket was set up
exactly as a third party image hosting service, and that's what millions of its users have used it for, for over a decade. This is therefore a blatant moving of the goalposts, and a shocking breach of trust. OK, I know they need to make their money somehow, and I'd cheerfully pay a nominal fee, but this is way too much (I'm surprised they're not demanding payment in used dollar bills or bitcoins TBH).
So what can we do about it? Well, I'm really not sure! Perhaps somebody will come up with a forum plug-in that will redirect to a new server, or something similar? Thousands of bloggers are similarly rattled about this change, and I'm sure are working on solutions. In the meantime, when you start seeing this:
It *should* be possible to copy the image location into your browser, to see the image separately. I guess we'll just have to see how things pan out!
Topic: Photobucket: Change to Terms & Conditions (Read 14068 times)
