blank photos,....AGAIN, photobucket. is back to SCREWING PEOPLE

[mulberryworks]

@deQuincey


View attachment 79333

What are we seeing? Who's data plan is this?

More importantly, while the recovery/relinking of previously posted photos in valuable posts is very desireable to save the knowledge and effort that's gone before, shouldn't we be focusing on uploading all new photos to the e9coupe.com site itself? I had asked this question before and the answer seemed to be that currently, space wasn't an issue for photo storage on our site.

Certainly, any increased costs in the future for hosting more photos on our site should be less what members collectively might pay hodgepodge to commercial hosting sites looking to make a profit. TANSTAAFL folks. Free Photobucket was great while it lasted, but at some point they have to make money or turn off the servers. I've donated to e9coupe.com before and will again. Money well spent indeed.

I do make an effort to downsize the images from my cameras before posting, for example taking a 5mb iPhone image to something like 800k ( with a 2000 pixel longest dimension) for a 5x reduction in space requirements without much impact on quality. But I do this to be proactive, not because I have any knowledge of an impending space shortage. I'm simply using our resources lightly.

Getting back to rescuing deQuincey's images to make his valuable posts whole, if they are still visible with the Photobucket hack, I'd think that we could have some volunteer effort to bring them offline, then upload them to our site and relink them to their respective posts. It's a lot of effort, but I think we can do it. If deQ agrees, of course.

Just my .02.

 

[Markos]

@mulberryworks,

Read my posts. Xenforo has a utility to convert embedded images to attachments. The plan outlined is photobucket’s. Point being, cost would under $50 while the software ran.

What are we seeing? Who's data plan is this?

More importantly, while the recovery/relinking of previously posted photos in valuable posts is very desireable to save the knowledge and effort that's gone before, shouldn't we be focusing on uploading all new photos to the e9coupe.com site itself? I had asked this question before and the answer seemed to be that currently, space wasn't an issue for photo storage on our site.

Certainly, any increased costs in the future for hosting more photos on our site should be less what members collectively might pay hodgepodge to commercial hosting sites looking to make a profit. TANSTAAFL folks. Free Photobucket was great while it lasted, but at some point they have to make money or turn off the servers. I've donated to e9coupe.com before and will again. Money well spent indeed.

I do make an effort to downsize the images from my cameras before posting, for example taking a 5mb iPhone image to something like 800k ( with a 2000 pixel longest dimension) for a 5x reduction in space requirements without much impact on quality. But I do this to be proactive, not because I have any knowledge of an impending space shortage. I'm simply using our resources lightly.

Getting back to rescuing deQuincey's images to make his valuable posts whole, if they are still visible with the Photobucket hack, I'd think that we could have some volunteer effort to bring them offline, then upload them to our site and relink them to their respective posts. It's a lot of effort, but I think we can do it. If deQ agrees, of course.

Just my .02.

 

[Stevehose]

Pay $4.99 and migrate the pics out of there?

 

[Markos]

BTW, didn’t mean to sounds like a jerk when I said “read my posts”...

@mulberryworks

 

[HB Chris]

Hard to expect something for nothing.

 

[Markos]

Hard to expect something for nothing.

Photobucket botched the 2017 communication and pricing rollout (aka Paywall). I’m sure that heads rolled after that fiasco. That doesn’t change the fact that Photobucket’s business model was unsustainable and needed revision. It’s not like a free newspaper with a fixed weekly production run. They are storing billions of images and making no money in the process. Each day they add thousands of additional images.

Photobucket had a responsibility to their employees and their shareholders to stay afloat and relevant in a highly competitive market. Their solution was half baked, but they have subsequently arrived at model that is far cheaper than most. I spend more on my extra monthly icloud storage. I spend $6 a day on the gasoline that takes me to and from my $25 per day parking spot. I feel like 25 cents a day is a reasonable request for anyone to keep your digital hoard. With that said, I would rather see that money go to the forum, which is also free for those that chose not to donate.

 

[deQuincey]

have recieved a wassap from BoStruye
i am here happy to help, anything that goes in the direction of recovering the photos and it is in my hand i will do it
lets talk about how to do this

 

[Bmachine]

My understanding is that all that needs to happen is for you to open your photobucket account, pay the fee to switch it from a free account to a paid account and then notify the forum. At that point the admins can run the Xenforo utility which will basically move the photos from photobucket to the forum servers. As I mentioned I am happy to send you the $50 for this so we can put this recurring issue to bed once and for all.
Admins, please add or correct if I am off base here.

 

[dang]

At that point the admins can run the Xenforo utility which will basically move to photos from photobucket to the forum servers.

This is an "add-on" feature to the forum software and describes the functionality as "converts all hot linked images to attachments". You never really know how and what happens until you use it. It's been active for some time now. I'm guessing if the linked images are already part of a thread the add-on has already looked at them. Changing the photobucket account won't change the fact that the images are already linked to useless images, it only sees a link, not the quality of the image.

 

[Markos]

This is an "add-on" feature to the forum software and describes the functionality as "converts all hot linked images to attachments". You never really know how and what happens until you use it. It's been active for some time now. I'm guessing if the linked images are already part of a thread the add-on has already looked at them. Changing the photobucket account won't change the fact that the images are already linked to useless images, it only sees a link, not the quality of the image.

Hi @dang,

I checked Dequncey’s “Scheel Tale” thread and the images are still hotlinked. I assume that it means that the tool isn’t runni nv, or it doesn’t work for photobucket. there are several commenters on the app that installed it only for photobucket.

If it doesn’t worth then it doesn’t work. At least we can say we all tried. Thanks for the help @deQuincey!

Let’s test this hotlink to lezebre.eu

 

[dang]

I can manually run the script to "rebuild" the images.

 

[Markos]

BTW, the image above wrapped immediately.

 

[deQuincey]

apologies for not following the rational of your previous posts, not an expert in these issues

so, what should we do ?
or better said , what should i do ?

 

[dang]

apologies for not following the rational of your previous posts, not an expert in these issues

so, what should we do ?
or better said , what should i do ?

Moving forward, if you have images that are related to a thread you can store them on this site, either as an attachment or you can create your own album in the Media section and link to them. As far as reviving images for your existing threads, if you can verify what it will take on your end with the photobucket account we can help with the cost if needed.

I would highly recommend storing coupe related images on this site because we don't watermark them. There are hundreds and hundreds of photobucket images on this site that are not very useful because of their huge watermark.

 

[deQuincey]

Moving forward, if you have images that are related to a thread you can store them on this site, either as an attachment or you can create your own album in the Media section and link to them. As far as reviving images for your existing threads, if you can verify what it will take on your end with the photobucket account we can help with the cost if needed.

I would highly recommend storing coupe related images on this site because we don't watermark them. There are hundreds and hundreds of photobucket images on this site that are not very useful because of their huge watermark.

ok i understand

see, when i started posting i used other application, but then it came photobucket, and i used it because there was no way of holding the pics in the forum, or maybe it was but more complex, i do not remember

the essence of the bad behaviour of phtotobucket is that they started being for free, no mention of any fee, and then they started asking for money once they have sequestrated your pics

i am puting the photos in the forum now, but it has been thousands of posts with a lot of pics during all my restoration threads

here it comes the point, someone explained that it was possible to extract the photos from photobucket and put them in other place, this meant to pay photobucket for a limited period of time while the extraction last

but this is not possible ?

so what is the proposal ?

i will not pay photobucket forever

i am not using it anymore, the point is that my photos in this forum are linked from photobucket

let me know your thoughts

 

[dang]

here it comes the point, someone explained that it was possible to extract the photos from photobucket and put them in other place, this meant to pay photobucket for a limited period of time while the extraction last

but this is not possible ?

so what is the proposal ?

Here's what I think the problem might be. If your images linked from photobucket were still linked that way I could run a script that would grab them and store them all on this site. But, all of the linked images from photobucket have already been run through the script so the blurry images are now stored on this site with a path to this site. If we run the script again I don't think it will see the images that have already been stored here. Let me run some tests...

 

[dang]

Nope, doesn't work. Once the script sees the external link it saves it locally, so the only way to update the images is to relink them or upload them. I wouldn't be surprised if photobucket did this on purpose. Keep the original file names and let them get linked externally, but mess up the quality of the images so they can't be used. That way, the only thing different is the image quality which makes it really hard to differentiate between files.

 

[dang]

@Markos, got any ideas?

 

[Markos]

@Markos, got any ideas?

I’m seeing different behavior with the forum. For example, the scheel tale thread by @deQuincey still shows original photobucket embedded images.

As far as other ideas, I could perform a bulk update on threads with proxied photobucket URL’s, reverting them back to the original URL. As you know the original URL is still present, just wrapped inside the new forum proxy URL. 2002Faq does the same thing. Then run the conversion job again.

Anyway, we could test it on a single test thread. The hard part will be parsing the content and only replacing the wrapper. That is what regular expressions are for. Specifically regexp_replace. If the forum uses Postgresql 7.4 or greater then regexp functions are available.

 

[Bmachine]

Good grief. I’m so glad there are some smart people running this forum. New donation added.