Sent today...
Dear Mr Rupert Murdoch (and all his employees) at the late, dearly lamented Photobucket,
Ever since June 2017, when - without warning - you cancelled the links to literally thousands of my photos that were linked to, and formed the backbone of, my blogs - and did the same to millions of the site's users across the globe - you committed a heinous crime. In most legislatures, the withholding of something until a ransom is paid is called BLACKMAIL. To you, the withdrawal of a remote hosting service unless every user pays you almost $400 seems like "good business practice". You will never learn, will you?
When you and your acolytes at News Corporation took over one of the most popular social media networks in the world, MySpace, the arbitrary and spiteful changes you made there also alienated millions of users. Sound familiar? That site became a wasteland of abandoned profiles, and even though it exists in name today, was basically murdered - allowing one of your business rivals Mr Zuckerberg to "make a killing" out of your failure.
Now you have turned your "make money at all costs; stuff the people" philosophy to another of your acquisitions. For almost a decade I, and so many others, trusted Photobucket as a safe pair of hands for what more recently became known as "cloud storage" of my collated photos and images. Yes, people may have used its facilities to remotely link some of those photos to other sites, but this was done in the knowledge that the site permitted this function. Some, such as I, even paid you a subscription for greater bandwidth and storage, safe in the knowledge that Photobucket's business aim was to continue as one of the world's most popular picture sites.
It is no longer that.
I have painstakingly removed all links from my blog to your site. I have removed every photograph and video I ever uploaded. I have cancelled my direct debit. You will close my account forthwith.
And while you are at it, you can take back your disingenuous "International Customer Appreciation Weekend" email (with its appalling grammar and misspelt "IndepandAnce"). Take back your stupid slogans like "Welcome to the Family". I don't want to be related to you. Take back "for the love of photos" and "We are our history; We are our future".
You have stuffed your own business's "future". You are indeed "history".
Regards,
Jon
Obviously, I'm in the same boat, too! I have about 238 blog posts to fix. Mercifully last year I stopped using Photobucket for blogging and started just uploading pics directly. But yes, I’m painstakingly going back and replacing Photobucket’s html codes with the actual photos one by one on older blog posts! I’ve made decent progress with it. My “deadline” is March 2018 because that’s what I’ve paid up until (that’s when all the pics will become blank black boxes!). I won’t be signing up for the astronomical almost $400 a year membership – no one will! I suspect Photobucket will fold when that comes into effect. What a suicidal policy for them!
ReplyDeleteDespite what I said in the letter, I am in fact not quite finished correcting old posts on both blogs - I have ten years' worth to wade through! However, I have "broken the back" of the task by replacing every link that was to a photo in a named folder on PB (I had around 150 folders and sub-folders - all deleted now!); it's just the rest of the random shit (all 1100 images I have downloaded to the PC) I need to go through.
DeleteI hope the bastards go under, too! Jx