Photobucket images now fixed

[Nik]

As some of you will know, on 6th July, Photobucket.com made changes to their image hosting which means to have your images show up when embedded on 3rd party websites, you now need to have a paid account with them, at a very high cost.

This meant that overnight, images people have posted from their Photobucket accounts in forum threads were replaced with an upgrade your account message:




The instant result of this is thousands of lost images and significant damage to the forums content. It's not realistic to expect members to manually re-host images in their threads elsewhere and update their threads accordingly.

The good news.....

For a few days now I've been running some code which finds any externally hosted image in a post, downloads them to our server as attachments and updates the thread with the locally hosted image.

This process has now finished, so you should find all your threads now show their images correctly once more, and Photobucket are no longer able to hold us and our users to ransom.

 

[sevenfourate]

As some of you will know, on 6th July, Photobucket.com made changes to their image hosting which means to have your images show up when embedded on 3rd party websites, you now need to have a paid account with them, at a very high cost.

This meant that overnight, images people have posted from their Photobucket accounts in forum threads were replaced with an upgrade your account message:

View attachment 111297


The instant result of this is thousands of lost images and significant damage to the forums content. It's not realistic to expect members to manually re-host images in their threads elsewhere and update their threads accordingly.

The good news.....

For a few days now I've been running some code which finds any externally hosted image in a post, downloads them to our server as attachments and updates the thread with the locally hosted image.

This process has now finished, so you should find all your threads now show their images correctly once more, and Photobucket are no longer able to hold us and our users to ransom.

You kind Sir are an absolute genius !!! That is a master-stroke of epic proportions.

Huge thanks and congratulations to you in equal measure

I'm not very 'techy' Nik.....but how on Earth much storage / bandwidth did that take, storing all those on here ?

 

[Nik]

I'm not very 'techy' Nik.....but how on Earth much storage / bandwidth did that take, storing all those on here ?

Not as much as I thought actually, about 22GB in total. I'm running the same over on Cliosport and as it's been around for 16 years it's going to take a week or two running 24/7 to complete it.

 

[sevenfourate]

Not even close to my area of expertise - and I find 'technology' like this amazing and people like you 'very clever'......

A couple of weeks running 24/7 shows the size of the task.

Glad I hadn't started sorting even my singular progress thread seeing this happen !

THANKS Nik for your huge efforts

 

[l33th3tr33]

Massive thanks for doing that, I can't even begin to imagine how many people will appreciate it!

 

[Chris]

Thanks for sorting that Nik.

Must admit I saw some of the emotes had gone like that, but put it down to the site where I got them from. Imagine there's some big progress threads on here which has been really helped by that!

As if photo bucket wasn't popular enough now, how to dig yourself a hole (and put people to ransome...)

 

[matt9566]

Great stuff Nik! Thanks a lot for that, I can now resume browsing peoples progress threads instead of doing actual work at work.

 

[///M]

As some of you will know, on 6th July, Photobucket.com made changes to their image hosting which means to have your images show up when embedded on 3rd party websites, you now need to have a paid account with them, at a very high cost.

This meant that overnight, images people have posted from their Photobucket accounts in forum threads were replaced with an upgrade your account message:

View attachment 111297


The instant result of this is thousands of lost images and significant damage to the forums content. It's not realistic to expect members to manually re-host images in their threads elsewhere and update their threads accordingly.

The good news.....

For a few days now I've been running some code which finds any externally hosted image in a post, downloads them to our server as attachments and updates the thread with the locally hosted image.

This process has now finished, so you should find all your threads now show their images correctly once more, and Photobucket are no longer able to hold us and our users to ransom.

Nik, you absolute LEGEND!!!

It's not just the guys who have the accounts who have been affected, this helps all of us who want to read the posts!

I've been saying for many years that photofucket will do something like this. Hope they burn in a pit of fire!

Very well done for sorting this out mate, makes a monumental difference to the ongoing brilliance of this forum and retains the historical encyclopedia here too.

Buy yourself a big cake and a beer and feel good about yourself!

 

[Pav]

as above..many thanks as we all were absolutely gutted..all the hard work that went into building our threads up..
glad theres a way round it..wish photobucket could see this!!

thank you

 

[Dmonk197]

legend!!!

 

[sevenfourate]

..wish photobucket could see this!!

Do think photobucket seeing this would be a good idea buddy !

 

[Chris]

Should be ashamed of themselves tbh, but then again as I'm sure they will soon find out, it's going to damage them big time!

 

[Jimmy]

Thanks very much Nik, sterling work to get all that done. Must have caused a few headaches I imagine, but it's really great news for the forum!

 

[Micah]

Nik, I just want to say a massive thank you for sorting this all out. The effort people put into running this site is probably easily taken for granted, but it's things like this that make you realise the dedication to the cause. Cracking job, thank you.

 

[sevenfourate]

@Nik

Just to clarify: Does this mean users here can / should continue to use Photobucket for picture hosting.

Ie: Was this 'just' for old pictures or is the conversion program in place and still ongoing for the future ?


And - do you think Photobucket are likely to realise / find out / get around this eventually. So are people better-off changing storage hosts to be sure ?

 

[Nik]

People should ideally just upload their images directly to the forum using the upload image button, but if they don't the system will catch up and import it eventually anyway.

If people want to use an external image host I'd avoid photobucket though as what's the point if you can't share them on other sites.

 

[DannyAG200]

Trying off an iphone and its still not working? The whole link isnt converting to a picture? Tried deleting to the IMG part too? No luck

 

[DannyAG200]

Also does this mean no more inserting images after a messaged part or?

It works on my android, however iphone its not at all

 

[krash67]

Well done Nik.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Arch]

That's an outstanding achievement I had a build thread for my race Impreza ona few forums and over 10 years worth of build thread was destroyed overnight. If only other forums could do this.