firstgencrx

Hello All! I hope you guys and gals are doing well! This message is probably in the wrong place, but it directly relates to material hosted on this forum.

Photobucket. What a mess! I find it amazing that any of my images are still showing up on RPR. Photobucket has started to send me warning messages that I need to upgrade my account (to the tune of $399 a year) if I want to keep them alive on this forum (and others). I would prefer that all my work stays up to help and inspire others. I would love to see this stuff copied and even improved on! I claim no ownership to the work mostly because it was all inspired from the work of others. So my hope is it to keep it open.

I'm looking into buying a hosting account from a place like Bluehost or Godaddy and hosting them there. It's long time overdue I have some kind of web presence anyway. That way I would have more control over keeping the images on this forum. I would then need to grind through what I estimate to be over 800 images, and change the address they all point to so they can still be viewed. That would all need to happen BEFORE Photobucket brings them down because once the image is gone, I makes it much harder for me to know what image was originally there. I get dizzy just thinking about it...

So far, I am not finding a "Terms of Service Agreement" for any of the hosting companies I'm researching that will specifically say I can host images on third party sites. They do say that I can host and share images from a website of my own creation. Adding to that, companies can change their terms of service agreement at any time... So what to do is a sore spot at the moment and I'm working on it. Loss of everything on this forum though I fear is a possibility.

I find it amazing that Photobucket would think this is some kind of smart business move. The pricing they want to 3rd party host is ridiculous. I'm looking into the idea of changing all of the images to links. I personally think that idea sucks because it's nice to see an image when you're moving through a thread. But, it might be a way for me to host the images from a personal website and not break the service agreement. The second idea I'm having is to build a website of my own, and then put up all my build threads on my site. I would share all the different components I made for these awesome little cars. I would then edit all of my old threads on this forum and just point the user to the website. That idea sucks because then we loose what I consider the invaluable interaction and flow of ideas! The whole reason forums exist...

I will keep working on this...

Take care all!

David