Wow. Photobucket just unceremoniously ended hotlinking for anyone who doesn't cough up $400 a year. Billions of images all across the web just became advertisements for Photobucket. This is unbelievable.
My login/password still work for now, so if you have an account and remember your credentials, I recommend backing up anything now. Who knows what'll happen next.
Everyone should also adblock Photobucket, especially if you frequent old forums, or you'll be seeing lots of these ads from now on.
@matt I knew they'd done this since a couple of days ago but I didn't realize the plan they required you to be on was their highest tier, jfc
@matt "Our model for monetization failed horribly because we didn't come up with enough useful features early on enough that people would find worth paying for and now we really are in the red of the fucked"
"Oh gods what do we do"
"I guess we just charge everyone through the nose now until we inevitably go bankrupt"
@matt On the things I run where people linked photobucket, I made a script to grab the images and then saved them to my server, since I figured everyone's images are probably gonna vanish
@matt I heard about this earlier last week. So stupid :-(
(are they desperate for money or do they just enjoy pain?)
@matt heck to the tech companies
@matt They are probably losing market to imgur and are desparate for money? But that's just a wild guess.
Shitty move either way.
@matt Ew. Bandwidth and space weren't even expensive back when Photobucket was still relevant.
$499 will get you 6 terabytes of transfer on Amazon Cloudfront. Storage cost on S3 is negligible unless you're hosting a lot of images.
@matt Ew. Bandwidth and space weren't even expensive back when Photobucket was still relevant.
$400 will get you several terabytes of transfer on Amazon Cloudfront. Storage cost on S3 is negligible unless you're hosting a lot of images.
@Riley It's such a transparent attempt to shake down the small business owners who don't know better and still rely on them. People who can't afford to hire dedicated employees to handle their online presence usually stick with what works. The reason they charge so much is because they know there are people for whom the $400 fee would be less devastating than the business they'd lose while they revamp everything. It's disgusting.
@matt Had a feeling something like this would happen when just visiting the site itself became ad-infested hell. 😕
@matt Has this possibility been written in their terms of service or had they performed a ninja update on them before introducing the fee?
@KrzysiekJ I don't know, but nobody saw it coming, so if was in the ToS then they weren't transparent enough about it.
@matt You know I completely forgot Photofuckit even existed. I stopped using them and Tinypic (both the same company as of a few years back) when they got ridiculously slow and unwieldy and ad-bloated, and grabbed everything off my account that I could, deleted it all from their server, and shut it down.
I still wince every time I see some poor bugger using it.