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I've been seeing this the past week on a lot of forums that I still frequent. There's one particular car forum where I've been following a guy for the past thr
by CorpOverreach 9y ago
I've been seeing this the past week on a lot of forums that I still frequent.
There's one particular car forum where I've been following a guy for the past three years doing a project car build. 80+ pages on the thread, with hundreds of images. Now they're blocked.
Several other big threads suffered similar fates.
Needless to say, none of them have any plans on paying up $400 to Photobucket.
The real loss here is the potential loss of history - many niche forums have 15+ years of history on them, a lot of it in the form of how-to guides, FAQs, etc about things you won't find in any manual.
- _delirium 9y agoIn addition to Photobucket, Dropbox disabled (after some advance warning) its former Public folder feature in March this year, which killed another big chunk of embedded images in old forum threads. That one can be worked around without paying anything by converting the old public folders to "shared" folders with the sharing permissions set public, and then going back and editing the old forum threads to point to the new image URLs, but as you can imagine a pretty small percentage of people are going to do that for old threads.
- vbezhenar 9y agoForum should download and host linked images. External links are not reliable and it's not the first incident.
- tyingq 9y agoThat's technically a good idea, but also exposes you to a bunch of DMCA problems if you don't limit it to known image hosts. Not that the requests would be legitimate, but it's still a nuisance.
- AndrewStephens 9y agoYou are exposed to the DMCA whether you host the images yourself of not.
- tedmiston 9y agoNot really a loss of history as much as broken links. The files still exist.