Unintended activity: Photobucket · 1:35am Jul 18th, 2017
Tonight I'd plan to write up my not so hilarious TrotCon adventures, but then...
About two weeks ago, if I'm remembering properly, Bluebook said Photobucket was beginning to actually enforce their terms of service, that is, no third-party hosting. Well, guess what I've been doing? An email notice arrived saying I was cut off.
The assets on my home page and the pictures in my blogs have been hosted on Photobucket for four years. I don't begrudge them making money, but even at their lowest, pre-paid level, it's not a good value for what I need or use. The cost for their 50G plan is about that same that I pay for CrashPlan to back up my entire machine, with unlimited storage and file versioning too.
I feel they've done a bait-and-switch. If the original terms of service forbade third-party hosting, why was it not enforced from the start? And like someone expects me to read the terms of service? Pfft! Where's the "I accept" button, I've got better things to do than understand what i just agreed to.
Back to price. Now, if they'd offered a 99¢/month plan with the same 2G storage, just adding third-party, I'd have sighed and whipped out the credit card. Problem solved for them and me. But they didn't and as a consequence I'm not using them anymore.
This wasn't a big deal, as I only had twenty-four images stored there, a whopping 5M of my 2G free account. Patching up my home page and the blogs took some time, but I can't imagine what somebody with hundreds of images would need to do if they didn't sign up for a plan. Likely, nothing. And there's another problem.
Go over and look at The Descendant's home page: I'll wait. He had a really clever, artistic thing going on, and now it's borked. And it will likely remain that way since he's been gone for thirteen months. Images like that will be all over the place, here and all over the net, many of them never to be fixed.
I feel the free advertising they are getting with their little meter image is going to help any. Their reputation will be just as broken as the images.
I use the free version of Dropbox, and it's been fine for years. It will e-nag you to upgrade to a paid account every once in a while, but otherwise it's pretty cool.
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I've got everything moved over to Google Drive. A small modification to their share URL seems to let them load up fine.
I may have to look into Dropbox: I think that is the sharing mechanism that Scrivener requires for their iOS version. I'll need a new tablet before I go that far, but it sure would be nice to be able to work on projects when and where ever I pleased.