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+--- Thread: Photobucket - and the rise of legitimate ransomware (/Thread-Photobucket-and-the-rise-of-legitimate-ransomware)
Photobucket - and the rise of legitimate ransomware - Beylon - Jul. 20, 2017
I suppose we've all been watching in horror as Photobucket moves through their account database, disabling 3rd party hosting one-by-one. For anyone who doesn't know, we were once able to share Photobucket images using the inbuilt sharing features of Photobucket itself. The result was simple: your image would appear here on the forum with no questions asked. But the original plan by Photobucket was to direct traffic through those images back to Photobucket by including links in the auto-generated IMG tags. Any two-bit hack will tell you it's easy to just erase the link from the tags if you don't want your readers booby-trapped into clicking their way to Photobucket. I guess Photobucket finally had enough of people standing up for themselves.
So over the past six months or so, images have been slowly disappearing from the internet. Not everyone went at once. Some accounts have been affected for months, while mine (for example) only went recently. Obviously I can still access my own images and others can access them too - but only through the Photobucket website itself. Or so it seems. Correct me if there is a work-around here. But we all know how terrible, intrusive and otherwise just plain dangerous the Photobucket website is.
The real problem with this "development" is that a number of awesome old threads here on the WBO are either broken or will break soon. For example, the Silver Tops thread by Lowen93 is gutted. And worse for me, the Formula Bei archive is completely stripped. Now, I have backups of my own work and I can find a new image-host. But even if I get my images back online, the Formula Bei thread is still broken from the WBO forum update last year. That means I can't go back and edit the original text in the thread to update the IMG tags for the new host. Meanwhile, someone like Lowen93 hasn't been around for a while and nobody else has the authority to update his awesomely historic thread (there's other awesome threads too, I just have his link handy).
I'm obviously not paying anyone who holds my data to ransom. So I wonder if there is a work-around anyone knows of, or some more secure way of hosting images (and organising them, unlike tinypic) for the forum in future?
RE: Photobucket - and the rise of legitimate ransomware - TrainiacJ - Jul. 20, 2017
Have you considered Imgur? From what I've experienced the organizing images aspect ends at just albums of images, but the site itself seems pretty secure.
RE: Photobucket - and the rise of legitimate ransomware - Kei - Jul. 20, 2017
Yeah, I recommend http://imgur.com/. It's an infinitely better image hosting website than Photobucket, which was always slow and extremely cumbersome in my experience ...
RE: Photobucket - and the rise of legitimate ransomware - Beylon - Jul. 21, 2017
Yup, imgur looks like the next choice. Funny, I remember back in the day when imgur was the nasty one of the two. How times change. Still a pitty about the broken IMG tags though. Rest in peace, Formula Bei.