SC4 Devotion Forum Archives

SimCity 4 General Discussion and Tutorials => SimCity 4 General Discussion => Topic started by: evarburg on December 02, 2018, 06:55:29 AM

Title: Photobucket Adds in Mayor's diary.
Post by: evarburg on December 02, 2018, 06:55:29 AM
My MD has been moved to its appropriate place (apologies, Tarkus, I didn't know it wasn't supposed to be on "Recently Published"). And I suddenly see big honking "PROUDLY HOSTED ON PHOTOBUCKET" add stuck on the ten or so first pictures. What the kronk ? Considering I left that site in a huff after the photoborking debacle, last year (or the year before ? Time flies when you're old) and migrated all my pics to another site, I find this especially annoying, notwithstanding the fact that the add just destroys the pics. They were not stellar to begin with (those were my first CJs pics) but nevertheless !

Is there anything I can do about it ?
Title: Re: Photobucket Adds in Mayor's diary.
Post by: art128 on December 02, 2018, 07:05:11 AM
Sadly, apart from having the original stored on a HDD somewhere and replacing them using another image hosting service, I doubt there is anything that can be done...  :(
It's because of stuff like that, and recently Flickr deciding to limit the number of pictures for free account that I bought a domain, set up a webserver at home and decided to host my own stuff from now on.
With free image hosting service it's only a matter of time before something like this happens. Casimage in the past wiped their servers without any advance notice, which made me lose a lot of picture. Imageshack and Photobucket, and let's, not forget the german website i can't remember the name. It's logical anyway: HDD space, server costs, electricity, bandwidth, domain.... It's not free to run a website!

In the end I suppose you're better served by yourself.. :)
Title: Re: Photobucket Adds in Mayor's diary.
Post by: evarburg on December 02, 2018, 08:50:15 AM
Thank you, and yes, of course, image hosting is not free and cannot stay free for along time. I am on Smugmug for the time being (paying a small fee, if I am not mistaken. Must check !); I wouldn't know how to do what you did. But I have almost all my SC4 CJs picts stashed on a hard drive. I'm gonna look for those ones and check...
Title: Re: Photobucket Adds in Mayor's diary.
Post by: Kitsune on December 02, 2018, 10:37:36 AM
If you have the original link it may be possible to easily find them again.
Title: Re: Photobucket Adds in Mayor's diary.
Post by: evarburg on December 02, 2018, 11:01:40 AM
Quote from: Kitsune on December 02, 2018, 10:37:36 AM
If you have the original link it may be possible to easily find them again.

During the photobucket kerfluffle, I didn't terminate my account but I downloaded ALL my photobucket pictures. Unfortunately (1) they were the only one that had been photoshopped (to erase the grid, when I was playing on my Mac) and (2) I am not sure I kept all the originals (I'm gonna check...). And what I am afraid of is that this add monstrosity is another Photobucket's ploy to force its users to subscribe to their costly plan and that it will work like the previous one. i.e. slowly creep down the list, with more and more pictures being similarly defaced. Perhaps I should close my account with them ?
Title: Re: Photobucket Adds in Mayor's diary.
Post by: Tarkus on December 02, 2018, 06:47:58 PM
Quote from: evarburg on December 02, 2018, 06:55:29 AM
My MD has been moved to its appropriate place (apologies, Tarkus, I didn't know it wasn't supposed to be on "Recently Published").

No need to apologize, and in fact, Recently Published was the correct place at the time you opened it.  We only went to the unified Mayors' Diaries board yesterday (http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=18304.0)

Photobucket, oddly enough, has actually partially reversed course.  They originally took everyone's embedded images down unless they were willing to shell out for an absurdly expensive plan ($399/year), though it seems as a result of the negative feedback, they went to grandfathering older embedded images with the ad watermarks and downscaling, and offered cheaper plans (more on the range of $4.48/month) for embedding newer images.  Whether or not they'll keep grandfathering the old ones is the big question, so I'd advise everyone who is/was using Photobucket to download all of their stuff while they can.

Imageshack also pulled the rug out from under everyone--going to a subscription plan, and allowing one to get back into their images if they subscribed by a certain date--but they didn't do a particularly great job of informing users of the intricacies of that change.  That pulled down the better part of 86 MD updates for me (a few of those 86 were on Majhost, which shut down entirely), and while I do have the images still, finding the time to go in and re-upload and re-embed them is a different story entirely.

-Alex
Title: Re: Photobucket Adds in Mayor's diary.
Post by: evarburg on December 03, 2018, 06:26:48 AM
Quote from: Tarkus on December 02, 2018, 06:47:58 PM
they went to grandfathering older embedded images with the ad watermarks and downscaling, and offered cheaper plans (more on the range of $4.48/month) for embedding newer images.  Whether or not they'll keep grandfathering the old ones is the big question, so I'd advise everyone who is/was using Photobucket to download all of their stuff while they can.
-Alex

I imagine "grandfathering" means keeping the pictures and allowing access to them ? I had already DLed everything at the time, but now sent myself a few images with the "share image" function. The watermark (that's the word I was looking for earlier  :) does not show up in them. (?) Gonna test them...

.........................

Well, apparently, the watermark does not show up.
Title: Re: Photobucket Adds in Mayor's diary.
Post by: evarburg on December 04, 2018, 07:50:31 PM
(Well, I manage to replace the affected pictures. Phew !)