Professor Umbridge owns Photobucket

[Nicolas King]

Hey everybody,

Photobucket has recently changed their policy to completely disallow all third-party use of their hosting beyond a very expensive monthly plan. (Image hosting is expensive, and hotlinking makes it more expensive.) With this change, they've started to display this error where other images should be:

Spoiler: This isn't pretty

Yech.

Not wanting the board spammed by Photobucket and their minions of evil, any users still hosting images on Photobucket should switch them to an alternate image host (perhaps imgur) as soon as possible. This includes signatures and avatars. Any shopkeepers with item images hosted on Photobucket should also reupload them.

In a couple days we'll be sending warning PMs to any accounts with Photobucket images still in their signatures. A little bit after that, we'll automatically remove any remaining signatures which contain Photobucket images to keep the board looking tidy.

We're sorry for the hassle this will cause, but it's not our doing, and thanks for helping to keep HNZ looking as fresh as ever.

-Nick
(On behalf of the admin team)

 

[Marisol Woods]

I think maybe images may be cached for some people, so the images might be showing up 'fine' for them. Maybe viewing a page under an incognito window or a different browser might be helpful to see, if you don't know if your images are the ones that are broken!

 

[Ainsley Lynch]

Yeah, when it hit me I couldn't see any difference in my images at first, I only found out because Daph told me they were broken. Spent about 2 hours the other week shifting eeeeeeverything to imgur

A FYI if anyone needs immediate access to a broken image for any reason (broken images in archived lessons, for example) right click & open image in new tab should show you the correct image. Not the most elegant solution, but it should do the trick.

 

[Georgiana Night-Carter]

tumblr is also a great place to host photos. I have a special HNZ tumblr, since now you can have multiple tumblrs. Just thought I'd throw that one of there for people who might not enjoy image hosting websites or something.

 

[Nicolas King]

tumblr is also a great place to host photos.

Regrettably, I have often found that if a user's images are hosted on tumblr they will not load for me. I suspect that tumblr doesn't love their stuff being hotlinked, either.
Fortunately, even if I can't see tumblr images all the time, they don't put in an ugly placeholder to spam the universe, either.

 

[Katherine Alicastell]

^^ I thought it was just me. I actually noticed this happen today with tumblr, when Steph linked photos in the tattoo topic. I can view images hosted on tumblr from my phone, but not from Chrome.
​

 

[Silas Darlington]

I didn't realise Tumblr did that
I went to flickr first after Photobucket got Umbridged but that was no good and then just went to Tumblr.

Oh the thought of having to re-save everything to some other place again

 

[Georgiana Night-Carter]

Hmm that's interesting cause I have no problem with tumblr images on Chrome :/ I guess I'll have to rethink my photos.

So does it look like I don't have a banner for Georgiana? Do tumblr linked avatar's work? Oh the questions.

 

[Katherine Alicastell]

I'm not sure why it is. Your banner for Georgina works, but all I could see in the tattoo topic was a broken "posted image", though looking at it again it's since loaded.
​

 

[Nicolas King]

Ya, tumblr is not a reliable site for third party image hosting, but it will always appear so to the people who upload the images to tumblr because they're cached.
Unfortunately, hosting images to be hotlinked elsewhere ie by definition costly and not profitable. So finding reliable hosts will always be a challenge. For now, imgur seems to be good (but they've been known to blacklist sites that use too much of their resources).
We've had to hop hosts before. People used imageshack in the past, and tinypic, and each proved unreliable. Now Photobucket has done the same - just on a much larger scale than the others had done!

 

[Georgiana Night-Carter]

Umbridge is buying up all the sites then it seems. :/

 

[Nicolas King]

Archived​

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This topic can no longer be considered 'news' but should rather be called 'olds'. It has thusly been archived.
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~The HNZ Site Staff