Excuse me from being a retard with anything internet based, but I assume we're talking about some off-line storage site like CLOUD where people store their data.
Due to utterly CRAP internet speeds where I am, I don't know anyone who uses them. I personally use my external hard drive and back-up every few weeks.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

It'll be interesting to see how this pans out; whether it's the beginning of the end for free 3rd party hosting like Photobucket and others were offering or whether the uproar over what they've done to countless forums and their knowledge base will cause some reconsideration.

It's not as if everyone who used the 3rd party linking option on Photobucket were somehow doing something underhand that the management have only just discovered. It was a mainstream feature of the site and one of the reasons many people opened accounts in the first place. Without it I doubt I'd have even heard of Photobucket never mind been a user for the last 10yrs or so.

If the core issue is that "freeloaders" like me have been using the site but not spending any money there then that does reflect more on their business model than my morals; if they had something I wanted or needed to buy then I would have been a paying customer. Just another site though - and one with such poor bandwidth that's it's often unusable - offering to print my photographs onto a coffee mug doesn't get me coming back that often.

I wonder how much thought was given to the knock on consequences of the action they took. They can of course do whatever they wish with their own site but totally ignoring the effect their decision has on other parts of the internet does smack of either naivety or callousness, neither of which are characteristics I'd like to have in a business I pay money to and /or depend on. Whether any of the more litigious parts of the Photobucket community consider there's a legal responsibility to maintain the existing links will be interesting to see.

So, what's likely to happen from now on? There are a few other free hosting sites but tbh I'm not going to rush to swap over and also I'm not going to pay $20 /30 a month (or even a year) to have the facility to post a few pictures here and on a few other sites. I could host images on my own website and link them through but a. it'll require me to spend some time working out how to do it and b. as my signature link to the (non commercial) site fell foul of the mods as unpaid advertising some time back I don't feel like doing it anyway.

If Photobucket et al are really going to be pay or leave (for 3rd party linking anyway) I wonder how many here will pay? If only a few stalwarts are able to post images will that make a difference to the look / feel of the site or will it be yet another headache that Grant will have to deal with?

Click on the READ THIS link in the first post.

__________________
"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)