Photofucket.

[The Phantom]

True to a degree. We had a trojan attack on www.patrol4x4.com a few years back and a few guys fired up a Patrol4x4 FB page. It's going strong, but it's actually become something of a feeder for our forum because members there get sick of answering the same questions over and over, and point people to our site. So the two can co-exist if the dynamic is right.

Photobucket seems to be standing their ground on this so it does look like everyone will have to re-host their pics elsewhere (or here) and update their topics - that is, if they want to preserve them, I'm sure many won't bother especially for very big topics.

[LKC73]

I'm still in the process of uploading all of my build pictures onto another site. Once that is done I will do the task of updating my build threads here again to replace all the broken links to pictures.

[Gix11]

Big effort. Thanks Luke.

[LKC73]

Big effort. Thanks Luke.

One down, and next the 7/11 build! That will take some time as it had alot of pictures. but if anyone wants a link to the album, let me know and I can post a link to it.

[rod185651]

So much info lost, I was doing some research yesterday, so many threads on this and other forums ruined.

[LKC73]

So much info lost, I was doing some research yesterday, so many threads on this and other forums ruined.

I would think its fucked over basically the world of the net. I see alot of Ebay listings used photofuckers to host pics as well. they have been removed. its just shit.

[LKC73]

So I thought I would share how to use Imgur, and once you have an account, and if you have albums set up, follow these steps to post your pictures in your threads or replies.

Once you have an account set up, and albums done, pic the album you want to use


If you want a new album, click as pic below,


Once you have opened an album, your pics will appear from top to bottom with most recent at the top.


To get the link you want to share and host in the forum, "hover" the mouse over the area located in this pic.


You'll see this arrow show up,


Click on it and you see options drop down,


After you have got the new options open, see here for the needed link to post on forums.


Then it is as simple as pasting in here,


I hope this helps out some of you.

[rod185651]

Nice one

[Bob]

Ta mate. Next update I'll give it a go

[CK 187]

You can go back and repair your existing Photobucket pics if you have ability to edit your own posts. We have had big success with restoration over at Customfighters


Insert "~original" after the JPG bit of your photobucket picture link............
has worked on all mine

like this................

http://i85.photobucket.com/albums/k67/370steve/GS750 retro/100_5444_zpsk9osgsya.jpg~original[/img]



It's a patch that seems to be working on many forums. Give it a go. It's time consuming, but if each person went back and repaired their own threads, it would be a huge savings of photos and historical info

Just my $.02

[GammaBoy]

You can go back and repair your existing Photobucket pics if you have ability to edit your own posts. We have had big success with restoration over at Customfighters


Insert "~original" after the JPG bit of your photobucket picture link............
has worked on all mine

like this................

http://i85.photobucket.com/albums/k67/370steve/GS750 retro/100_5444_zpsk9osgsya.jpg~original[/img]



It's a patch that seems to be working on many forums. Give it a go. It's time consuming, but if each person went back and repaired their own threads, it would be a huge savings of photos and historical info

Just my $.02

Nice. Just tried it, wonder how long it will work for?
I suspect that's what the chrome plugin does to allow you to see other peoples photobucket images.

[Gix11]

Yea, interesting.

[LKC73]

That's a very cool tip CK, I may give it a run on my 7/11 build.

[sen]

That ~original trick wont work for long, but it'll give you time to rehost the images. It just tricks their URL detection into thinking it's not a direct link to a .jpg, but as soon as enough people do it and it shows up in their logs, they'll fix it.

Rehosting to imgur is your best bet for now, but they've also shown they're desperate for money and trying various user-hostile tactics lately.

Trusting some random company to look after your images forever for free was never going to last. The only truly future-proof way to protect forum images is for forums to host their own images. It's not expensive/hard anymore, it just requires customising the forums a bit.

[rod185651]

That ~original trick wont work for long, but it'll give you time to rehost the images. It just tricks their URL detection into thinking it's not a direct link to a .jpg, but as soon as enough people do it and it shows up in their logs, they'll fix it.

Rehosting to imgur is your best bet for now, but they've also shown they're desperate for money and trying various user-hostile tactics lately.

Trusting some random company to look after your images forever for free was never going to last. The only truly future-proof way to protect forum images is for forums to host their own images. It's not expensive/hard anymore, it just requires customising the forums a bit.

So what do we need to do?

[sen]

So what do we need to do?

I was going to contact Si soon about upgrading ASF (for various reasons, but mainly for attachments), just got a baby due literally any day now, so was waiting until that's passed.

Ideally we could migrate ASF to one of the new forum platforms like Discourse with s3 image hosting for an all-round more future-proof setup. Discourse is much much lighter on the server, faster, more adaptable to modification, and generally just works better since it's written from scratch using the latest methods, and not based on decades of development like vB/phpbb/alltheothershittyoldforums.

My other idea if an upgrade isn't feasible was to make a dedicated ASF image host. I've got various servers that could easily handle the load of ASF, and then it's not dependent on anyone else, it'd entirely be in-house. Hosting has gotten a lot lot cheaper than it used to be, but forums in general still see hosting images as taboo/scary due to the past.

Once new baby is settled, i'll absolutely help sort it all out. Until then, people should just get their images off photobucket/elsewhere so they're not lost.

[rod185651]

I like it, I would love to see the forum back to its hey days.

[CK 187]

That ~original trick wont work for long, but it'll give you time to rehost the images. It just tricks their URL detection into thinking it's not a direct link to a .jpg, but as soon as enough people do it and it shows up in their logs, they'll fix it.

Rehosting to imgur is your best bet for now, but they've also shown they're desperate for money and trying various user-hostile tactics lately.

Trusting some random company to look after your images forever for free was never going to last. The only truly future-proof way to protect forum images is for forums to host their own images. It's not expensive/hard anymore, it just requires customising the forums a bit.

Didn't expect it to be a permanent fix, but like you said it gives us time to recoup and rehost.

Agreed that hosting at the forum level is the way to go. We are working now and increasing server capacity to allow all permission levels of members to host different amounts

[Gix11]

I'm all ears...
We'll have to talk Sen as I was just about to try and migrate it to my new planned work servers, but you may have better ideas, and now Xenforo2 seems to have hit the shit your ideas sound interesting.

[sen]

I'm all ears...
We'll have to talk Sen as I was just about to try and migrate it to my new planned work servers, but you may have better ideas, and now Xenforo2 seems to have hit the shit your ideas sound interesting.

For sure mate. As soon as stuff settles down at home i'll give you a shout. Happy to help however I can as always.