For years, many Internet users of forums like ours relied on Photobucket (and similar sites) for central storage of pictures to share with friends and family across multiple Internet sites.

Photobucket was largely popular because it was a free hosting service. It appears this has changed. As a result, various threads on MCF.com that included pictures hosted on Photobucket may be broken and may have an image like this in it's place:


Unfortunately, there is nothing we the staff of MCF.com can do about this. If these images are seen, it requires the owner of the images to pay for a subscription service to Photobucket, which current articles state is a yearly cost of $399 a year.

When sharing pictures on MCF.com, we encourage you to use the ability to upload them when you post them. By uploading the pictures, they are then hosted on MCF.com servers and not controlled by a third party provider. This ensures that as long as MCF is operating, those pictures will remain available.

Sources of information:
Your access to 3rd party hosting is temporarily disabled.
https://www.pcmag.com/g00/news/35471...s-the-internet
https://petapixel.com/2017/07/01/pho...-embedded-web/

 

My account shows I am on the free 2 GB plan. Though I don't use it much since MCF offers free file attachment/picture hosting.

The Outback forum offers it too.

Problem with photobucket is once I reach the limit I start to delete older images. Sorry Rav4World and FirebirdNation.

 

You described a very common problem with the "free" Photobucket accounts, once you hit a limit, you begin purging old pics and if they were linked to other sites, potentially valuable threads begin loosing pics vital to helping the thread.
Luckily, as far as I know, MCF.com has no issues with uploading photos and other files.

 

Well I'm still well below my 2 GB "free" plan but all of my images that I've shared on this site now all have the "account update" image shown above. You may be able to upload and have pictures on your "free" Photobucket account but sharing isn't possible anymore. Let me just say that Photobucket has become increasingly annoying to use with all of the pop-up ads and other crap that comes up while on their site.

For those like myself that use it strictly for 3rd party sharing, it's worthless now. And I will not pay to use it. The Ad-free Plan is $2.49/mo but does not allow for 3rd party sharing so why even bother with that plan? The cheapest Plus Plan is 52 GB for $59.99/yr ($5/mo).

 

It was only a matter of time before they began changing the free services to pay services.
I strongly encourage no matter what forum you are on (be it for cars, crafts, stereos, whatever), if they allow you to upload photos to their site, go for it. Some like MCF.com allow you to upload from a local drive OR from a URL/web-based location. The advantage is if you share something on a forum and they now have the content on their server, nothing is lost if a 3rd party picture hosting site makes a change (or if you clean house to get storage back).

 

It's a hard gut-punch to forums like this. I was just going thru some of MCF's stickies and the Tech Guides, and of course a lot of the photos used to illustrate repairs and mods are linked to Photobucket, which means they all might as well be invisible now. It's quite a lot of key reference material that's now effectively disappeared.

Can't do much about that, which sucks for us all.

But I definitely agree, the best thing to do from now on is to attach pics to the posts instead of linking pics. I learned that lesson myself a while ago, so I'm happy to attach pics to my posts, as are a few others here. (And it'll probably help if people keep those attached pics under 1 megabyte in size... )

 

I always attach the pics myself. I don't care to do it twice first you upload to the outside host and then you upload again.