photobucket

[mjeff87]

Stolen from a post read on Pirate, which was stolen from another forum:

 

Photobucket has a new management team that wants to do the right thing. We are committed to earning back your trust and offering comprehensive and flexible image storage and hosting options for our customers. We’ve taken your feedback and made some changes to our pricing model that allows us to offer competitively priced plans that fit the needs of all of our customers. Today, our current customers’ hosted images have been restored and Photobucket is introducing a new pricing plan that is built around everyone’s needs. For a limited time, we are offering a new, competitive subscription package that includes ad-free storage and 3rd party image hosting for just $1.99 per month, or $19.99 per year - which is 95 percent less than the previous pricing model. . . .   Too little, too late, I'm afraid.   Jeff

[mjeff87]

“Our focus since I took over has been customers first,” said Ted Leonard, who joined the company last fall as its finance officer and became CEO in March. “Two months later, we’ve turned back on the images. It’s an important day. Millions of images were restored that were lost forever. Our mission is to bring back customers and regain customer trust.”

 

“Anytime you lose a user, whether they’re a paying customer not, it’s tough,” Leonard said. “We took a step back and looked what mistakes were made. But we didn’t spend a lot of time on what went wrong in the past but going forward, what kind of services will be offered. They (customers) want an improved experience and a perceived value of reasonable prices.”

 

Emphasis added by me above.  Unbelievable.

[Minuit]

Too late. They can go F themselves.

 

Fixing the damage they did to their reputation ain't gonna be as easy as saying "Oops, we realized we did an unpopular thing. Love us again!"

[DirtyComanche]

[Nelson laugh]Ha ha![/Nelson laugh]

[HOrnbrod]

[Pete M]

"for a limited time"

 

greedy bastards never change and will always be greedy bastards.

 

the silver lining is that their greed really got me off my butt to upgrade our site.    (with help from members of course.  lord knows I couldn't do it myself.)

[Eagle]

I saw this announced on another site. It referred me to the Photobucket web site. On that site I found nothing to indicate a $1.99/month plan. On one page they say a plan with third party hosting is $399.99/year. On another page they say it's #39.99/month -- which comes out to 479.88/year.

 

I agree in the skepticism regarding "For a limited time only."

 

Thanks, but no thanks.

[87MJTIM]

Too little, too late 

[Pete M]

I don't have high hopes, but I'm curious whether anything they do will fix some of the dead links left in our forum from when members deleted their pb account.      probably not.   

[johnj92131]

Photobucket simply made a fatal mistake.  No chance of recovery.  Just like the Dodo bird.

[Eagle]

8 hours ago, Pete M said:

I don't have high hopes, but I'm curious whether anything they do will fix some of the dead links left in our forum from when members deleted their pb account.      probably not.   

 

Not sure, but I'd guess that if someone deleted their account, the photos are gone. Mine might be visible again -- I didn't delete my account. I haven't used it since their attempted blackmail, but I left it up because I wanted to be using up space on their server.

[kryptronic]

If a photobucket account was deleted, it would not have been undeleted as a result of photobucket's recent change in terms of service.

 

In the fall members of this forum worked to archive all the available images originally on photobucket that were referenced in these forums.  The only ones missed were the images posted by photobucket accounts whuch users deleted.  Those are lost forever.  The majority were saved.

 

CC members fixed this screw up for ourselves and put in place forum image hosting so this never happens again.  Moral of the story is use the forum image and stuff like this won"t ever hurt us again.  Please.

[gogmorgo]

Photobucket was frustrating to use before they did this. There were and are significantly better image hosts out there. Forcing users to pay was just icing on the cake.