It's a shit situation. Half the internet is up in arms and broken to a certain extent about it. It's a serious blow to the historical content here and most other forum based websites, ebay and many others too. This really sucks and raises big questions for the internet as a whole and its role as historical record, as websites like this try and be. It's a disaster for a massively large amount of content.
What I have said is that I am waiting for the dust to settle to see what good solutions arise, as they surely will. In the mean time if people want to fix their threads themselves I will unlock them if they PM me. Admittedly this will only fix a tiny proportion of the broken content as most won't bother. What I can do to fix the old content myself I'm unsure, but I am continuing to watch what unfolds on the tech forums. If something useful and viable appears I will obviously implement it. I assumed that went without saying.
There's two issues here, one is getting the photos off photobucket (which cannot be done automatically in *any* circumstance now because by its very nature you cannot access the photos other than through photobucket. You will always have to manually upload them to another host), and the second is how you update the old content to use the new photohost links.
There is a convoluted and complex method of renaming/uploading the photos and using a bit of forum side code to automatically update threads, but it's not user friendly, requires the photos to be locally hosted, uses a subscription based piece of third party software from a small company to run that photo-hosting and will still only work for those who go through the process. It's not a route I'm willing to go down yet as it's incredibly unproven, and would require a discussion between all of us about how we covered costs if we did go down that route. Small solutions like that create as many problems as they solve because they're even more unstable than big companies are. What happens if the hard disk crashes on our server (daily data backups cost a fortune), or the database crashes, or the photohosting software company makes buggy software and we get hacked? etc. This is why flickr etc are a better bet, they supposedly will be around and reliable for a long time... supposedly.
I thought most people knew that OT, Maniac and all the other main players in the Urbex scene think I'm a laughing stock and our interactions have never been positive. What I am doing is going direct to source and looking at the forum management sites to see what solutions other people are using. Currently they're not because there aren't any yet. I'm sure that will change, I hope that will change. This is too big a problem for someone to not step into the breach and pick up what PB have dropped. We'll see! I am only human too and I might miss things, so if you or anyone else sees a good solution please tell me! That's what I was getting at.
I guess it's easy to forget that over the past 11.5 years I have invested a huge amount of time and energy into this site primarily for other people's enjoyment. I get very little out of it personally, mostly stress and hassle, a lot of which goes on in the background because I don't bitch about it or let it show on here, I try and keep this a pleasant environment for everyone. I do what I can, when I can, and I do the best I can, end of story.
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.... hold maybe thats why you get all the email fella lol
