PhotoBucket policy hits Waymarking

[+MountainWoods]

You may have noticed that PhotoBucket has changed its policy concerning what it calls 3rd Party Hosting.  My own family website was using linking to about 90% of my photos on PhotoBucket (not 100% as PhotoBucket was claiming!!), and that killed the visibility of most of my pictures on the site.  Instead, the picture is replaced with their own picture, which I've attached to this posting.

Many of the photos inside Waymark category descriptions are links to photos in actual Waymarks, so that the photos are on Waymarking.com itself.  But some categories used PhotoBucket to host the photos, which really messes up the category description if PhotoBucket assumes that the user account is using 100% 3rd Party Hosting -- which, as I mentioned before, it will assume even if it isn't true!

Is there another way to get pictures uploaded to the Waymark servers without having to attach them to a Waymark and then locate the URI for the picture?  I'm guessing that this is something that the lackies could do, but it might consume a bunch of time that could be spent on more important things. Perhaps the category leaders could use a single non-categorized Waymark for uploading photos to, and that would accomplish the same thing.  Doesn't matter if the photos are for the posting itself or a "virtual visit" to the Waymark.  As long as the Waymark is never deleted, the photos are secure on Waymarking.com.

What do you think?

P.S.  I've already contacted our friend veritas vita about Route 66 - The Mother Road.  Hopefully we can soon get those photos over to Waymarking.com to fix the category description.   What a bother!

Edited August 15, 2017 by MountainWoods
Removed wording that only the owner can get to the real picture on PhotoBucket. Not exactly true.

[+MountainWoods]

I started an uncategorized Waymark for fixing the Route 66 - The Mother Road category's description.  I should be done fixing it in a couple of hours.

Edited August 15, 2017 by MountainWoods
Typos.

[+MountainWoods]

Would you believe: less than an hour?

I've got the category description for Route 66 - The Mother Road fixed.  I also checked all of the other categories that am an officer for, and they were already good.  That is, they were already using photos on Waymarking.com in their descriptions; or no photos at all.

Good luck to anyone else who has this issue.  I can offer advice and encouragement.

[+fi67]

There are a lot of categories with broken external pictures. This is not PhotoBucket specific.

I have most of my category pictures uploaded to a waymark, but I use an old denied waymark. Uncategorized is a bit too public for me.

[+T0SHEA]

For a number of WM pix we have used a real waymark as a "photo bucket", one fairly close to home. Unfortunately the flourishes on about 18,000 of our waymarks are on Photobucket.

I've often wondered how long it would take me to edit 18,000 or so Waymarks. Maybe one day soon I'll get to find out.

BTW - we don't have many images at Photobucket, maybe 40 or 50 at the most.

Keith

EDIT: OMG!!! Just looked and found that there are z (wrong end of the alphabet) a heckuva lot more pix there than I figgered! Most aren't used, as far as I know.

Edited August 15, 2017 by BK-Hunters

[+MountainWoods]

17 hours ago, fi67 said:

There are a lot of categories with broken external pictures. This is not PhotoBucket specific.

I have most of my category pictures uploaded to a waymark, but I use an old denied waymark. Uncategorized is a bit too public for me.

The problem I'm talking about is PhotoBucket specific. Did you look at the picture in the first post?  Do you see the light blue www.photobucket.com/P500 at the bottom?

Categories that have "broken external pictures" that aren't hosted on PhotoBucket may be experiencing a similar issue with the hosting site in question; in which case the way to fix those are similar to fixing the "new PhotoBucket policy" broken images.

If they aren't from a similar problem (and not from PhotoBucket), then they should be brought up in the Waymarking.com Features & Functions forum, and not in a discussion on the new PhotoBucket policy. 

[+fi67]

21 minutes ago, MountainWoods said:

The problem I'm talking about is PhotoBucket specific. Did you look at the picture in the first post?  Do you see the light blue www.photobucket.com/P500 at the bottom?

Categories that have "broken external pictures" that aren't hosted on PhotoBucket may be experiencing a similar issue with the hosting site in question; in which case the way to fix those are similar to fixing the "new PhotoBucket policy" broken images.

If they aren't from a similar problem (and not from PhotoBucket), then they should be brought up in the Waymarking.com Features & Functions forum, and not in a discussion on the new PhotoBucket policy. 

Yes, of course, the current problem is PhotoBucket specific. I see the facts.

I am sorry, if it looks like I tried to pull this thread from its original topic. This was not my intention. What I was trying to say is, that the current PhotoBucket problem is basically just a new manifestation of a more general underlying problem.

When you rely on third party servers to illustrate your categories or waymarks, it makes certain things easier, but you lose the control over it. And sometimes this ease does entail negative side-effects and additional maintenance effort. It is still fine to do it, but we must be aware of the risks, and I think many people aren't.

Sorry for this desruption! Now back to the original topic...

[+T0SHEA]

The next question would be:

At what percentage point would Photobucket assume 100% third party hosting? Will they get nasty and treat 50% as high enough to trigger a response? 60%? 33%?

Now it seems a good thing that we have so many useless photos hanging about in our account (and wasting Photobucket hard drive space) as our hosted pix could only amount to 1 or 2 percent at best.

Keith

[+MountainWoods]

Yeah.  Heaven knows (and maybe the other place) what formula that the PhotoPukeBucket folks are using to report 100% 3rd Party Hosting.  I had several very large albums (including the largest with 81 photos at the time) that none of the photos in these albums were pointed to by any other HTML page.  At least not my pages!

I wonder if, since they allow this, if someone else happened to point to one of my photos, do they count that toward the 100% 3rd Party Hosting?  I don't see how they could tell the difference between my pages versus anyone else's page.  I could just see person A screwing up person B's PhotoBucket account by making a single web page that contains img links to every photo in person B's account (obviously maliciously).  PhotoBucket now sees person B as using PhotoBucket for 100% 3rd Party Hosting.  Wham.  Zap.

I understand why PhotoBucket changed their policy.  They can only survive by the advertisements you see on the PhotoBucket pages.  When your HTML page simply uses an img tag to "suck in" a photo from PhotoBucket, there is no visibility by the page viewers of any of that advertisement.  They just see a photo, and don't even know where it is hosted.  So PhotoBucket started killing that (or only allowing a small percent?  ha! not when they always flag your account at 100%!).

But pointing to an album on PhotoBucket (with an a tag) is a different matter.  Viewers who follow the link do see all of the advertisements on PhotoBucket when perusing the album.  So those should not be counted toward the 3rd Party Hosting.  But, again I'm guessing that, they count all of the photos in the album as being 3rd Party Hosted if you point to the album, which makes no sense.  (And thus, is probably true.)

[+fi67]

My guess is that the number of pictures is not important at all.

More probably they compare the real requests. Number of requests with a local referrer vs. remote referrer. This is easy to monitor using the server log files.

If you have one picture embedded in a third party site like Waymarking.com that is visited 100 times and nine pictures that are visited once directly on PhotoBucket then you don't get a ratio of 10%, you get over 90%. And the hundreds of pictures nobody looks at do not count at all.

[+T0SHEA]

16 hours ago, fi67 said:

If you have one picture embedded in a third party site like Waymarking.com that is visited 100 times and nine pictures that are visited once directly on PhotoBucket then you don't get a ratio of 10%, you get over 90%. And the hundreds of pictures nobody looks at do not count at all.

That seems to be a believable assessment of how Photobucket might tally visits. It comes out a bit scary, too.

So, PLEASE don't visit any of our Waymarks - it may upset the delicate balance and force me to start the long and arduous task of editing them all.

Just kidding...

We have noticed, though, that we're starting to get a lot of visits, especially to Waymarks in the Maritimes. Must be a lot of tourists there this year. Lately we're getting so many that Barb has started keeping track to see how many we get this month.

Keith

[+MountainWoods]

21 hours ago, fi67 said:

My guess is that the number of pictures is not important at all.

More probably they compare the real requests. Number of requests with a local referrer vs. remote referrer. This is easy to monitor using the server log files.

If you have one picture embedded in a third party site like Waymarking.com that is visited 100 times and nine pictures that are visited once directly on PhotoBucket then you don't get a ratio of 10%, you get over 90%. And the hundreds of pictures nobody looks at do not count at all.

Makes sense to me.  That is, how they may be counting references makes sense, not the reasoning behind it.  Too bad they don't look at which photos are referenced in the server logs, instead of just using count of references / count of photos for that account.

Anyway, like you said, this could affect any site that hosts photos that might change their policies as PhotoBucket has.  Best to get any images from any non-Waymarking site moved over to Waymarking and avoid potential (and in PhotoBucket's case, real) problems. PhotoBucket is one of the oldest and most used sites for uploading images to freely; and what they do may start other sites administrators scratching their heads!