Asking the help of our community to solve the Photobucket problem

With the recent decision of Photobucket to disable free unlimited third party hosting, charging a fortune from those who want to keep it, many pictures on forum got lost and replaced by an image of Photobucket asking for our money.
As Photobucket made it suddenly without any advise and without giving a certain time to their users find a better option, It not only represented a kind of destroying act against boards like STS as it is really not acceptable.
I'd love to recomend to everyone to not give way to this Photobucket pressure and, as possible, move their pictures to a free host service like [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] or post directly on forum - for instance and delete the photobucket account. It is just a suggestion.
As many topics got useless without pictures, our moderation team will have a lot of work to remove all these links. We have an option to remove them all at once but we are not using it once some members have paid the fee and we respect it and we don't want to block their pictures.
Though, it is a huge task. Most of the old and useless topics, especially from unactive members, will be deleted. Other topics may be archived and I am talking about thousands of topics and a work that will last several weeks or months. Deleted topics have 90 days to be recovered, so, if you miss it, just ask the Admins.
Our forum will survive and we would like that members that used photobucket during these years, could rehost their pictures and replace their photobucket links for the newer ones. It could help us to recover lots of fantastic topics, especially walk arounds, show us yours and general discussions.
As we know it is a hard work and that it takes a long time, these topics won't be deleted waiting that you can save some of them.
About additions and collections topics, you can let us know if you want to replace the pictures on them or if you want to start new topics. If you want to start new topics, we will archive your old ones.
STS as many other foruns are having a bad time because of Photobucket but, we are surely stronger and the forum still has a rich amount of topics that preserve the story of this community.
I am sure that with the help of everyone, we will keep our village a fantastic place to live and keep enjoying our hobby of collecting toy animal figures!

*stands ready to help*
Where to begin! What can I do :)

What help you need ??

Andreas, your topics seem to work fine once you don't use Photobucket.

NightLioness wrote:

*stands ready to help*
Where to begin! What can I do :)

Karin, I know it is a boring task but the best you can do is to replace the pictures in your topics. Obviously you don't have to do it in them all but walk around topics are really important. You don't have to do it at once, just do it as your free time let you and then post at the end a message telling that pictures were replaced. STS doesn't want to loose your great walk arounds.
By the way, not of use for your walk arounds but you can post your blog pictures directly on forum just copying the url address of the picture and copying it on to the insert picture button.

Roger wrote:

Andreas, your topics seem to work fine once you don't use Photobucket.

NightLioness wrote:

*stands ready to help*
Where to begin! What can I do :)

Karin, I know it is a boring task but the best you can do is to replace the pictures in your topics. Obviously you don't have to do it in them all but walk around topics are really important. You don't have to do it at once, just do it as your free time let you and then post at the end a message telling that pictures were replaced. STS doesn't want to loose your great walk arounds.
By the way, not of use for your walk arounds but you can post your blog pictures directly on forum just copying the url address of the picture and copying it on to the insert picture button.

Luckily I have all my walkarounds on my computer.
So that is going to be fine :3 Shall look at others of my topics, topics of no use can be deleted.

let us all help the forum be vibrant and colorful again even without photobucket by posting more of our beloved collections in STS and be more active. i for one will be more active by posting regularly my collection photos to let people become aware of little known brands and figures. thanks.

I will re-post my pictures in my topics, although it may take some time.

I use Flickr and Imgur so I don't have any issues but I really think its pretty disgusting that Photobucket pulled this stunt. Its not even a reasonable amount either, its hundreds of dollars!

I will try to work on my own topics as soon as I find the time (and energy) . As I have thousands of pictures lost, I think the best I can do is to focus on those

Really, Photobucket !! I am sure it is not possible to sue you, but I hope your decition makers will get flies in their coffee for years to come

i cant even open their site anymore. i dont know if it's my own connection issue. but it's been like that for a month already. ive been trying to open my pb account to retrieve some photos that arent in my files anymore.

I want to thank all members that are making an effort to recover the pictures of their topics. It is the best help you can give for now to minimize this Photobucket problem. Meanwhile, more than a hundred of topics were deleted. Especially topics of little use and from members that are not active anymor. Obviously only those that lost their pictures. Though, that is just the start. Please keep your good work recovering your topics. Mainly your walk arounds or topics with relevant information.

I changed 25% of my topics. Even if my pics are still visble they will disappear too in a few months so I don't want to waste time.

My photobucket photos are still visible to me but as I don't have many posts, I've changed what I can to postimage.

One topic was locked (suggestions of 3 animals for Science and Nature) so I was unable to edit my post there.

Great Christophe! Your pictures are an aex libris of this forum. :)

Stu wrote:

My photobucket photos are still visible to me but as I don't have many posts, I've changed what I can to postimage.

One topic was locked (suggestions of 3 animals for Science and Nature) so I was unable to edit my post there.

Thanks for your effort recovering your pictures. I unlocked the topic. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Thank you for unlocking the Science and Nature topic Roger.

My images now changed to postimage.

I always used Servimg. Somthing i heard no one eles uses.

It has hiccups every now and again. but so far it has not held my images for ransom

Takama wrote:

I always used Servimg. Somthing i heard no one eles uses.

It has hiccups every now and again. but so far it has not held my images for ransom

I use it too, it's good, I don't complain

always used the STS image uploader for the very few posts I've made , no complaints here as well

Roger wrote:

Great Christophe! Your pictures are an aex libris of this forum. :)

Thank you for your kind words my Croc , the job is done for all my topics.

Great! I continue deleting/archiving topics that lost their pictures and that are from non active members or that could not be recovered. More than 3300 were deleted until now but there is still a lot to do!

Roger wrote:

Great! I continue deleting/archiving topics that lost their pictures and that are from non active members or that could not be recovered. More than 3300 were deleted until now but there is still a lot to do!

I need one part of this cake, which one Rogério?

Kikimalou wrote:

Roger wrote:

Great! I continue deleting/archiving topics that lost their pictures and that are from non active members or that could not be recovered. More than 3300 were deleted until now but there is still a lot to do!

I need one part of this cake, which one Rogério?

Christophe, I've just have sent a pm to you with a big slice of this cake.

I'm not on the Forum enough to be any help! But I've not used them since 2009 so what little I've uploaded is with the Forum default . . . to be honest, I thought Photobucket had died years ago, they were always hard to use and would lose you images daily!

H

This is my first post in a forum at all. I hope, I dont break any rules.

I know, the Photobucket-problem is not new. But for those who still have this problem with Photobucket, I found two interesting links:

1. general comments and solutions

2. experience to the browser plugin

Maybe these pages will help.

Hello, Thomas, and a warm welcome here

Thankyou VERY much for the links ! Very interesting !!!