So Ive noticed this image popping up on BLF
!!
If you use photobucket to hotlink your photos you’ll probably see the above image in your posts instead.
Photobucket now want $399 a year subscription! Ludicrous!
I’d assume a very large proportion of internet forums use photobucket for hotlinking images, they’re going to lose alot of, ‘now’ angry and frustrated customers.
If Photobucket think they are going to make money from this exercise I’d suggest to them otherwise. All they are going to achieve is a lot of unhappy customers and trashed forums.
In the early days here it was one of the recommended places to host pictures. Not now.
Get your act together Photobucket.
As unfortunate as it is, it’s not exactly surprising. Bandwidth might be cheap but it’s not free and hotlinking images makes no money for the host (ie. no ads or anything of the sort). They don’t even get visibility as nobody knows where the image comes from. Until it no longer loads anyway, in which case it’s not very good publicity for them
Their original business model was based on allowing hotlinking with advert support for funding it. When you go to upload an image you are exposed to adverts.
Except for a lot of people who have all their pictures on there and will pay $400 so they don’t have to endlessly search the internet to relink all of their pics.
Pretty big scam tbh.
As someone who has a forum (unrelated to ’lights) I am only surprised that it took PB this long to tire of providing free anonymous hosting of images that are only or mainly used to post to forums. Everything costs. I have used them a lot and never contributed a nickle. Perhaps I am partly to blame,but I think I understand the costs they face. No free lunch. Theycould care less about where the images are used.
Hi everyone, this is indeed frustrating, but please avoid swearing and thinly veiled variants of swear words. Thanks in advanced for going back and cleaning things up.