Attempting to keep the dream alive...

Has anyone found a site wide solution that allows forum owners to grab the photobucket images? Like many forums we have had a long history of using sites like Photobucket for image hosting since it was usually easier (and better) than the pretty poor image hosting built into vBulletin.

I have now implemented this little plugin (and excluded photobucket for now), something that has been on the radar for a year and sadly I hadn't yet done.

Interestingly, 60% of images from 2005 - 2011 are now dead links vs less than 30% of post 2011 links. None of that that is surprising but highlights the real benefits in using something like this if you can afford the storage space and bandwidth.

I did post this in that other thread but will put it over here as well in the hopes that someone smarter than me can implement this type of work around.

This plugin for chrome appears to work on the user side to get around the problem. I do wonder if this sort of thing could be implemented on the serverside to allow the external image grabber to do it's thing. Even if it only works temporarily it would allow me to grab the images while I can and host them locally.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d...alioapbifiaedg

I shortly looked into it a couple of days ago and it shouldn't be too difficult to make a script that downloads all "broken" Photobucket links and updates the links in all posts.

It takes a bit of time to write such plugin though, maybe I have some spare time within the next few weeks.

I always discourage my users from using third party image hosting services, and I manually edited posts as they occurred to attach the images inline whenever a user used such a service, because I never trusted such sites to exist forever.

That being said, I think what PB has done is despicable, and I feel bad for all those sites whose images are now broken. :(

I'd love to believe that PB would at least temporarily reverse their decision allowing the forums of the world to retrieve (and re-host) the content rather than let so much content die a sad death. But then there is no money in that or any likely any future customers... but then I don't know that there are many customers is a $400 / year offering anyway.

I think that more than a few people would be very grateful... I'm sure I could scrape together a few bucks to support a working solution.