Following up on the Photobucket issues at the start of this month, Bobm and I have now rehosted the images from our most major users that they have used in existing posts on our own servers. The post contents have not been changed; rather, I have modified the forum code to map the photobucket web addresses in posts to the replacement addresses where the images are stored un-encumbered.
Images we're already hosting (and any others we rehost - there are 2 or 3 smaller sets we still could) appear correctly in existing posts and quotes of those posts too. They will also appear correctly if used in new posts. But neither Bob nor I are offering a replacement service for Photobucket which provides the photograph's owners any edit / replace / add to collection facilities - essentially they're an archive, and that archive's uneditable. Should there be reason to amend a thread so that it no longer shows an image in the future (very rare indeed, but it has happened), we would advise the picture owners to go back and edit their posts that refer to it, to remove the reference or point to an alternative elsewhere; either Bobm or I could also delete images from the archive "in extremes" but the post(s) would need altering anyway if the thread owners didn't want to be showing a broken image.
The Coffee Shop software offers limited hosting of attachments that can be added onto the end of posts - currently we have 2,831 such attachments in our database. These are of limited size and number per post, and do no appear in-line but as smaller "postage stamps" you can click on at the base of posts, and even these postage stamps are not shown on the "recent posts" display. Attachments are not suitable for use as a general replacement of in-line images, and at the Coffee Shop we won't be offering a replacement facility to store and serve your pictures as the basic Photobucket account used to do, and the $399 account there still does. There are other facilities around (I haven't noticed a huge drop in images, so most of you are using something else
) and
posts with recommendations and comments as to alternative systems are welcome. Those of us with our own web service provision (be it dedicated, virtual or shared hosting) also have the alternative of hosting our own images, subject to limitations on the amount of space and bandwidth we pay for; on my own server, I have nearly 12,000 images for use all over the place, and most of which are distinctly off topic for the forum.
I have some sympathy with the problem that the company running Photobucket found themselves with - hosting a lot of data for free, yet having to pay for the hosts to hold it. They are probably not the only hosting service that fallen into this model, with something that started as a little loss leader to attract custom for profitable services having become a drain they can't or won't sustain. I'm not discussing the legality of their approach to a solution, but it's certainly questionable in terms of breaking a trust they had built up with their base of users, and the web being - err - a web, effects propagate over threads of the web such as the issues it caused in some of our poster's content here, and beyond those posters to people viewing their posts.
Photobucket are probably not the only free content hosting service that find or found themselves providing a service that cost more to provide than the income that was gained (heck, the Coffee Shop falls into that category!!) and so it has to be a very strong recommendation indeed that users keep excellent backups of everything which they cherish - not only images, but other content hosted elsewhere on the web too.
I have veered off what I was intending to write here ...
As members switch from one image hoster to another, facilities offered in terms of embedding may change. In particular, your new service may give you less image scaling capability. You can use the
width= attribute on the
img tag here to resize the image, but please bear in mind that the whole image will be downloaded when your post is browsed and this may effect our visitor's bandwidth.
Example:
Here is a normal sized breakfast:
and here is a smaller breakfast:
and I can also put the breakfast in the centre too rather than have it nearly falling off the edge
code (with added spaces to ensure I display the code and don't have the images show up here!
Original:[ img ]http://www.wellho.net/pix/bonybreakfast.jpg[ /img ]
Smaller:[ img width=400 ]http://www.wellho.net/pix/bonybreakfast.jpg[ /img ]
Smaller and centered:[ center ][ img width=400 ]http://www.wellho.net/pix/bonybreakfast.jpg[ /img ][ /center ]
