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By vout Thu Jul 27, 2017 2:28 pm
I noticed in the last few days that many images on this forum have been deleted and replaced with a photobucket warning to 'upgrade your account'. A quick Google shows that this is a widespread problem as Photobucket have just changed their terms of service and no longer allow free hotlinking. Instead they now want users to pay $400/year for this service! The problem is that they gave no notice to users and hid this info way down in the small print of their new terms of service.

This is a problem for forums like this that have a lot of technical info with images, Photobucket have wiped out years of useful resources (not just here but in forums worldwide) in an instant and there has been a huge backlash against it.

So I guess this is just a headsup - don't use Photobucket.
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By MPC-Tutor Thu Jul 27, 2017 3:07 pm
The whole image thing is a nightmare as ideally we'd just host them directly on the forum, i.e. let people upload images to our server, but there's so many copyright trolls out there it's just too risky taking on the liability in case someone uploads something they don't own. So we're left with image hosting services, which either eventually disappear or change ToS. It's the same with embedding music and videos, there's a lot of stuff on the forum now pointing to non existing soundcloud, myspace (who?) accounts etc.
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By MPC-Tutor Thu Jul 27, 2017 3:24 pm
Images can still be accessed by right click and 'view image in new tab' (in Chrome) as you won't be hotlinking this way. If I get the time I might try to salvage any important stickies and 'DIY' type topics that have missing images. There might even be a way to automate this using a script. Another temporary fix is to perhaps use iframes to show photobucket images.