Yes you've read it, Photobucket; the what was once website that lets you upload and store images, videos and other content and generate links that you can post to your blog or any website for free, no longer allows you to post any images to a 3rd Party hosting, so yeah WTF!
It all started after went home from covering ToyCon 2017 day 2 to check the Robot Pilipinas net traffic, to my surprise some of the images on the site no longer be seen, instead it was replaced by images of Photobucket telling me that I need to update my account to enable 3rd Party Hosting. 3rd Party Hosting means you can share your link or share your Photoboucket uploaded content to your site, forums and others, that include Blogger (the blog-creating website which created Robot Pilipinas, including this personal blog).
I checked Photobucket's website why this is happening, to my surprise their terms of use (TOS) were updated last June 28, and also my surprise, that free user accounts no longer has the right to host or share content freely online, unless you purchase their Plus Account 500 to fully utilize it. And do you know how much that account costs?! Its a frickin' $399.99 / Year!!! Hell where will I get that kind of money, since I only have seasonal contract work, so basically my pay doesn't earn me much and there's no way I can pay for a very expensive account upgrade. I understand Photobucket needs funds for the site to operate, but its not consumer friendly anymore as some of the account upgrades aimed at corporate level.
There's only one option that I can do right now to fix this frickin mess, is that I have to download and back-up all of my content that was uploaded in the Photobucket website and transfer it to a more suitable host, i.e. Google Photos or any other 3rd party image host website/s where you can share your content for free. After that, I can deactivate or terminate my account and kiss Photobucket's asses goodbye, because I ain't going to use their service anymore, effective immediately.
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