Flickr is doing a Photobucket.

[Sweetpea]

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/11/free-flickr-accounts-slashed-to-1000-pictures-the-rest-will-be-deleted/

In many ways they aren't being such a pile of gits as Photobucket were but all the same, that's my threads trashed.

James

[tommundy]

Hi James,

As a by-product of the work I did to protect us from the Photobucket saga, all images externally referenced are automatically re-hosted onto our servers, so your threads will be in-tact on here at least. :)

They won't be the full resolution ones, but at least you won't lose your build thread!

I imagine the hyperlinks on the images will stop working, but the actual images on the forum will remain, w00p.

Hope that helps alleviate your worries to some extent.

It seems like the fully free hosting platforms are disappearing one by one steadily, so you're left with a choice of either paying them, or sorting some of your own hosting.

Cheers,
Tom

[Sweetpea]

Hi Tom,

I knew you'd done that for Photobucket but I hadn't realised you were doing for everything. Well done and thank you!

So what happens if one of my linked photos disappears? ('Cos about half of them will.) Does the site somehow magically find the downloaded version and use that or do I need to do something exciting to re link them? Or has the site already replaced them and I haven't even noticed!?

In future would you prefer that I use the "Insert Image" button rather than linking?


To be honest I don't care much about the £50 Flickr charge. I can / could live with that. But I've gained so many ideas and so much inspiration from this and other forums and I write (at least partly) as a thanks to the people who inspired me. To support a community that has supported me... Now there'll come a day when my life changes and I don't pay the money. But I don't want the threads to die just because I've shuffled on and bought a bus/truck/tracked armoured vehicle (delete as applicable).

Thanks again,
James

[tommundy]

Hi James,

Yes, it's doing it for all externally hosted images automatically. :+: Nothing for you to do. :)

It's up to you, you can continue to use the Flickr route as long as you can if that's easier, as the plugin will capture those images automatically.

I imagine there will be another round of internet forums being further destroyed once the images over the 1000 Flickr limit start getting culled. Like you say, people could have moved onto new interests etc.. It's a real shame stuff like this is happening, as in my eye although forums have been losing out to Facebook in some ways, Facebook just doesn't give you what a forum does in terms of historic organised articles.

The Flickr move is also taking away useful information that's been given to various communities for free and for the greater good of knowledge sharing.

At least we've got a bit more notice with this compared to the whole Photobucket incident.

Cheers again. :)

Tom

[Sweetpea]

So...

It's taken me 2 months to rescue my other threads (on other sites) from Flickr's change of conditions and I've finally done it. The fact that I haven't had to touch this site has saved me a quite astonishing amount of time and effort.

Thank you Tom! I can't begin to tell you how much I appreciate it.

James

[jimi]

How did you implement that Tom ? Is it a vbulletin extension ?

[Sillyhatday]

So...

It's taken me 2 months to rescue my other threads (on other sites) from Flickr's change of conditions and I've finally done it. The fact that I haven't had to touch this site has saved me a quite astonishing amount of time and effort.

Thank you Tom! I can't begin to tell you how much I appreciate it.

James

Well done. I appreciate the effort.

I had to do that for the Photobucket round. It's no fun at all. I'm using Imgur at the moment. I'm not going to reccomend it as I don't know how long it will be until they pull the same tricks.

[tommundy]

So...

It's taken me 2 months to rescue my other threads (on other sites) from Flickr's change of conditions and I've finally done it. The fact that I haven't had to touch this site has saved me a quite astonishing amount of time and effort.

Thank you Tom! I can't begin to tell you how much I appreciate it.

James
Hi James,

Much appreciated! I'm so glad that I did it, as it's preserved our forum and its content for years to come.

:+:

Thanks again! It's messages like this that make all the work in the background worthwhile.

Cheers,
Tom

[tommundy]

How did you implement that Tom ? Is it a vbulletin extension ?
Hi Jimi,

Yes, it's one called "vB4 Import External Images".

It's now scheduled to run every 10 minutes to grab any new post images (from any source).

On the evening that I did the mass photobucket rescue, I had to keep manually re-running it to go through the whole back catalogue of the forum, otherwise it would have taken days (or weeks?) for it to get through all the content. It wasn't designed for that heavy abuse, so a fair few server restarts were required, but I got there in the end.

It still surprises me that no other forum admins from what I saw tried to do anything pro-active, but merely let it happen.

Hope that helps. :+:

[tommundy]

Well done. I appreciate the effort.

I had to do that for the Photobucket round. It's no fun at all. I'm using Imgur at the moment. I'm not going to reccomend it as I don't know how long it will be until they pull the same tricks.
Thanks again!

Yes, the only way to guarantee your images is to get some of your own hosting and domain name (and do backups of course! :)).

[Sillyhatday]

All my pictures are still stored locally. Stored on a network drive with a simple RAID 1 configuration. I'd like better redundancy in the future. Google drive and such is a poor option, as the internet in the sticks is awful on upload.

Any tips for hosting with a domain name?